Tom Brady Reveals His Backup Plan If He Never Became NFL Quarterback

It’s a good thing Tom Brady’s dropback game was so good he never had to fall back.

The Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback revealed to ESPN he probably would have sought a career in business if he hadn’t become an NFL player. Brady believes his education would have allowed him to enter most industries on firm footing, but he’s thankful his NFL dream came to fruition (and did it ever).

“I thought that’s kinda what my fallback plan was, to be in some sort of business situation,” Brady said. “I went to a really great university in the United States, the University of Michigan, and it prepared me very well.

“Although my main interest always lied in professional sports, so had it not worked out in football, I’m not sure what I would have done. Fortunately, I never had to, and I still haven’t had to think about what’s beyond football because I’m still actively playing. So it’s been a great career for me, and I still have things that I really want to prove to myself, and I’ll get the opportunity to do that this year and hopefully years beyond this.”

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Brady’s post-college resumé shows he had a 3.4 grade point average at Michigan and earned academic achievement honors in 1996, 1997 and 1998. He also interned at Merrill Lynch in Ann Arbor, Mich., in the summers of 1998 and 1999, so it seems like he was well positioned to enter the financial services industry if he wanted.

However, the New England Patriots drafted him in 2000, and he became the team’s starting quarterback during the 2001 NFL season. The rest became history, as his fallback option continues to wait its turn.

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