Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ new quarterback Tom Brady finally took the field for the first practice of training camp that was open to the media on Tuesday and left his new team, and those watching, impressed.
“[We] still have got to pinch ourselves, the fact that we have him at quarterback and everything that goes along with it,” Bucs’ tight end Cameron Brate said, according to ESPN’s Jenna Laine. “Everyone here is just super pumped.”
“He was really on top of it in the spring,” Brate said. “It’s all the same game — everyone runs, essentially, the same plays. You just have different verbiage for it. Just making those connections for him in his head because he was in New England for 20 years. He said it was definitely weird calling things [with] different terminology for him, but I think he’s going to be up to speed in no time.
“It could seem like a perfect pass, a great ball — everything seems spot on — but if he doesn’t feel it’s 100 percent crisp, exactly where the ball should be placed, if you weren’t efficient at the top of your route, you’re going to run it again until you really perfect it. He definitely is meticulous in the way he goes about his business.”
“The first time he texted me I had to get double confirmation from other people that it was actually Brady. He said, ‘Hey, this is Tom. Give me a FaceTime when you can,'” Brate said. “I had to reach out to Chris [Godwin] and Mike [Evans] and be like, ‘Hey, is this Tom?’ I didn’t want to be calling some random dude thinking it was Tom Brady. He’s just been awesome to work with.”
Teammates, such as Brate, have been a bit starstruck by Brady.
“The first time I met him, we were just coming around a corner and met each other. He said, ‘What’s up, big dog?’ I thought it was kind of crazy because he’s Tom Brady,” Bucs’ rookie offensive tackle Tristan Wirfs said. “Then he asked me how old I was, and I told him, ’21,’ and he kind of started laughing. He said something like, ‘You think you have experience? I’ve got double your experience.’ I was like, ‘Yeah.'”
