Tom Brady has seven Super Bowl rings, the most passing yards in NFL history, and absolutely nothing left to prove. And yet, 25 years later, there’s still one wound that hasn’t closed: the San Francisco 49ers, his hometown team, the team he grew up loving, passed on him six separate times in the 2000 NFL Draft. He has never let it go. He’s not sure he ever will.
The grudge Tom Brady refuses to retire: why he still “hates” the 49ers
Before he was the GOAT, Brady was just a Bay Area kid who idolized Joe Montana and grew up watching the 49ers dominate football in the 1980s and 90s. He was there, in some form, for the glory years, four Super Bowls, Bill Walsh’s West Coast offense, Montana finding Dwight Clark for “The Catch.” The 49ers weren’t just a team to Brady. They were the standard.So when San Mateo’s own local kid, a promising quarterback out of Michigan, entered the 2000 draft, it seemed almost written that San Francisco would call his name. They didn’t. Not once, not twice, six times the 49ers took other players before finally, in the third round, settling on a different quarterback altogether: Hofstra’s Giovanni Carmazzi. Brady would sit through the rest of that draft, watching team after team pass on him too, until New England scooped him up dead last in the sixth round, pick 199. The Patriots, for the record, had also passed on him five times before that, “just one less than everybody else,” as Brady likes to point out.
Twenty-five years, seven rings, and he still isn’t over it
What happened next barely needs repeating: Brady became the most decorated quarterback in NFL history, while Carmazzi never played a single regular-season snap for San Francisco before retiring and, fittingly, becoming a goat farmer. It’s a real-life football fable, and Brady has never resisted the urge to tell it. Every time he faced the 49ers over his 23-year career, he says, some part of him wanted to remind the men who’d been in that draft room exactly what they’d given up. “You chose a goat farmer over me,” he’s said, “and I never forgot that.”He’s repeated versions of the story for years on podcasts, in broadcast booths, in interviews timed to games against San Francisco, and each retelling carries the same mix of humor and genuine sting. He’s admitted the 49ers even circled back years later, first reportedly considering him over Jimmy Garoppolo in 2020, then again in 2023 when Kyle Shanahan pursued him amid uncertainty over Brock Purdy’s health. Both times, Brady said no. Whatever the reasons, it’s hard not to read those refusals as their own quiet punctuation on the story Brady, for all his talk of love for the franchise, was never going back.Steve Mariucci, the 49ers’ head coach at the time of the snub, has taken the ribbing in stride, noting that literally every team passed on Brady multiple times that year, and that he still loves the guy. Brady, for his part, seems to genuinely hold two things at once: real affection for the uniform he grew up watching, and real resentment toward the organization that decided, six separate times, that he wasn’t good enough. He still watches their games. He still, by his own admission, can’t bring himself to root for them.Twenty-five years and seven championships later, it’s clear the chip on Brady’s shoulder never really came off; he just found somewhere else to carry it.