Tom Brady

Overview

Tom Brady is a retired American football quarterback who won a record seven Super Bowls — six with the New England Patriots and one with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers — after entering the NFL as the 199th pick of the 2000 draft, and who later became a Fox Sports analyst and an investor in the trading-card platform Alt (Britannica; TechCrunch). Born Thomas Edward Patrick Brady, Jr., on August 3, 1977, in San Mateo, California, he played college football at the University of Michigan before a professional career spanning 2000 to 2022 that ended with NFL records for pass completions (7,753), passing yards (89,214) and passing touchdowns (649) (Britannica).

This profile covers Brady the football player and investor — the public, professional record — and follows him from a lightly regarded draft pick to the most decorated quarterback in NFL history, then into broadcasting and alternative-asset investing.

From the 199th pick to a New England dynasty

Brady’s path to the NFL was unglamorous. In high school he excelled in both football and baseball, entered the 1995 Major League Baseball draft, and was picked by the Montreal Expos — but chose the University of Michigan and football instead (Britannica). At Michigan he did not start until his junior year, yet led the Wolverines to victory in the 1999 Orange Bowl, gaining a reputation as a determined and intelligent player rather than an exceptional athlete (Britannica). That scouting report shaped his draft slide: the Patriots chose him in the sixth round of the 2000 draft, the 199th player taken (PlanetSport).

Opportunity arrived in the second game of the 2001 season, when starting quarterback Drew Bledsoe was injured and Brady was chosen to fill the position (Britannica). With Brady starting, the Patriots posted an 11–3 regular-season record and upset the St. Louis Rams in Super Bowl XXXVI, with Brady named the game’s Most Valuable Player (Britannica). Two more titles followed in four years — over the Carolina Panthers in 2004 and the Philadelphia Eagles in 2005 — and the Patriots posted a 40–12 record across Brady’s first three seasons (Britannica).

The peak of the Patriots era came in 2007, when Brady threw 50 touchdown passes, led New England to the first 16–0 regular season in NFL history, and earned his first NFL MVP award — only for the underdog New York Giants to end the perfect season in Super Bowl XLII (Britannica). A torn anterior cruciate ligament in the first game of 2008 cost him that season, but he returned to win a second league MVP in 2010, the first unanimous winner of the award, after leading the NFL with 36 touchdown passes and the Patriots to a 14–2 record (Britannica). A second Super Bowl loss to the Giants followed in February 2012, after a 5,235-yard season (Britannica).

The later Patriots titles carried their own drama. After the 2014 season, New England routed Indianapolis in the AFC championship game, but 11 of the 12 footballs the Patriots had used were found markedly underinflated — the “Deflategate” episode that led to a four-game suspension for Brady in May 2015, overturned by a federal judge before the season, then reinstated by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the first four games of 2016 (Britannica). On the field, Brady answered with a 28–24 win over the Seattle Seahawks in Super Bowl XLIX, passing for 328 yards and four touchdowns for his third Super Bowl MVP, then the largest comeback in Super Bowl history — from a 25-point third-quarter deficit in overtime — against the Atlanta Falcons in Super Bowl LI (Britannica). A third league MVP came in 2017, when he led the NFL with 4,577 passing yards, though the Patriots lost that season’s Super Bowl to the Eagles despite his 505 passing yards (Britannica). His sixth title arrived in 2019, a 13–3 win over the Los Angeles Rams in the lowest-scoring Super Bowl ever played, making the 41-year-old the oldest quarterback to win the game (Britannica). Across his Patriots career he threw for 74,571 regular-season yards and 541 touchdowns, was named to 15 Pro Bowls, and made the league’s all-decade teams for both the 2000s and 2010s (PlanetSport).

Tampa Bay, retirement — twice — and the second career

In March 2020 Brady left the Patriots in free agency and signed a two-year contract with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, a move that shocked the sport (Britannica). His first Buccaneers season was a major success: Tampa Bay won 11 games, then won three straight road playoff games to reach Super Bowl LV, where a decisive win over the Kansas City Chiefs delivered the franchise’s second championship and Brady’s seventh (Britannica). In 2021 he broke Drew Brees’s career passing-yardage record, became the first player to throw 600 touchdown passes, and finished with a league-high 5,316 passing yards and 43 touchdowns, before Tampa Bay lost its divisional-round game to the Rams (Britannica).

Shortly afterwards, in February 2022, Brady announced his retirement — then unretired less than two months later and played one final season (Britannica). That 2022 campaign made him the first player to throw for more than 100,000 yards across the regular season and playoffs combined, and ended with a division title despite an 8–9 record and a loss in the opening playoff game, after which he announced his retirement again (Britannica). Beginning with the 2024 NFL season, he moved into the broadcast booth as an analyst for Fox Sports (Britannica).

The Alt investment: from cards fan to cap-table name

Brady’s most documented step into the alternative-asset economy came while he was still playing. In November 2021, Alt raised a $75 million Series B led by Spearhead at a valuation the company put at over $325 million, backed by Seven Seven Six, Vibe Capital, Breyer Capital, Shrug Capital, Apollo Projects and a roster of individual investors that included Brady alongside Giannis Antetokounmpo, Alex Morgan, Candace Parker and Marlon Humphrey (TechCrunch). Front Office Sports independently confirmed the athlete group, reporting that Brady, Morgan, Parker and Antetokounmpo “invested in the company’s Series B round that closed last November” (Front Office Sports).

The investment fits the platform Brady was buying into: Alt lets users research, trade and vault graded trading cards, storing them in a temperature- and light-controlled vault that already held over $70 million worth of cards, and was beta-testing loans backed by those vaulted cards (TechCrunch). At the time of the round the company employed about 60 people, had hired former eBay collectibles chief Nicole Colombo as its first president, and was expanding beyond sports cards into Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh! cards (TechCrunch). For a quarterback whose own rookie cards are among the hobby’s most traded objects, the Series B put Brady on the other side of the collectibles market — not as a subject of it, but as a shareholder in the marketplace itself.

What this profile does not claim

• It does not claim a Raiders ownership stake or a Fox contract value: both are widely reported, but neither was verified from a fully-read source in this pass, so neither figure appears above.
• It does not state the size of Brady’s individual Alt cheque: the sources read name him as a backer of the $75 million round but do not disclose his amount.
• It does not state Alt’s status, or Brady’s continuing involvement with it, after 2021; no fully-read source covering later years was used.
• Career totals published at the February 2022 retirement announcement (84,520 yards, 624 touchdowns) differ from the final totals used here because Brady played the 2022 season after unretiring; the final totals are 89,214 yards and 649 touchdowns.
• Personal-life details are kept out by design: this profile sticks to Brady’s documented public and professional record.