Tom Brady has made it clear he will leave it up to football fans and media members alike to guess who he recently chastised for their free agency decision last year.
If you ask Sports Illustrated's Albert Breer, it was the team Brady grew up supporting.
In case you've been living under a rock, Brady during a recent episode of HBO's "The Shop" ripped an unidentified team for punting on their interest in him and sticking with their starter at the time. Breer, as he explained Friday on FS1's "The Herd," believes that team is the San Francisco 49ers.
"The Niners are the one that kind of sticks there that would probably bother him a little bit because he grew up rooting for them," Breer told host Colin Cowherd. "They obviously were very close to winning a Super Bowl and the quarterback there is Jimmy Garoppolo. So, there's a big part of me that thinks that Brady might have been like, 'That guy? That guy who I just beat out and had to keep beating out over and over and over again so Bill Belichick would eventually wind up trading him? That's the guy that you're passing up on me to keep?' So, I think if you're talking about where it might have personally dug into Brady, where the knife might have been twisted a little bit, just because of his personal connection to that area. He was that kid, the Dwight Clark catch. He was the kid, the five-year-old up in the stands at Candlestick. Like, there's part of me that thinks that that would be the team where he would probably feel it most.
"I can tell you when they went through their process, Brady reached out to them. They have a guy on their staff by the name of Wes Welker who I know was part of getting word up the flagpole to the people in the organization that Brady wanted to play there. I know John Lynch and Kyle Shanahan went through a thorough process in vetting Brady. They went back and they looked at the tape of Garoppolo again and they decided to stick with Garoppolo because of where they are from a roster standpoint. I understand why they did it, but I also totally get why that might have been the one to struck Brady a little bit."
Ironically enough, there's a chance Garoppolo's days as the Niners' QB1 are numbered. The eighth-year pro likely will enter the season atop San Francisco's signal-caller depth chart, but the organization obviously has high hopes for first-round draft pick Trey Lance.
