Mariucci responds to Brady’s jab at 49ers for not drafting QB originally appeared on NBC Sports Bayarea
Like all great athletes, Tom Brady still finds ways to let past slights fuel him.
The 44-year-old quarterback’s love for the 49ers as a child growing up in San Mateo is well known, and it has been reported that Brady wanted to finish his career in San Francisco but the 49ers opted to stick with Jimmy Garoppolo.
However, it’s a previous slight, one that happened 22 years ago when the 49ers opted to draft Giovanni Carmazzi over Brady that still irks the seven-time Super Bowl champion.
“I lost my allegiance for the Niners when they skipped over me six times 22 years ago, and drafted Giovanni Carmazzi after they had me do a local workout with Steve Mariucci, and decided I wasn’t good enough to play there,” Brady said on the “Let’s Go” podcast.
Carmazzi never started a regular-season game for the 49ers, who were left searching for a long-term replacement for the recently-retired Steve Young.
As for Mariucci, he chuckles at the fact that Brady is still irked by the 49ers not drafting him, seeing as all 32 teams passed on the Michigan product multiple times before the New England Patriots drafted him at No. 199 overall.
“Everybody passed over him six times right?!” Mariucci told KNBR’s “Murph and Mac” on Wednesday. “That’s awesome. I love Tom.”
As for that workout Brady referenced, Mariucci noted it was a local workout that had 50-to-60 players that attended local high schools or colleges. To Mariucci, it was impossible to get to know a player during these large group workouts, and Brady didn’t fit the mold of the type of QB the 49ers were looking for.
“As you know we were looking for a guy who was going to replace Steve Young, an athletic kind of guy, and that’s the way we kind of wanted to play football with that west coast offense,” Mariucci said. “Tom was kind of a drop back category for us and we were looking more for the athletic kind of quarterbacks, and they are hard to find. Heck, we had a couple of swings and misses, and ended up finding Jeff Garcia.”
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The rest, as they say, is history.
Garcia played five seasons for the 49ers, going 35-36 as a starter while throwing for 16,408 yards, 113 touchdowns and 56 interceptions. After Garcia’s time in San Francisco ended, the 49ers used 13 different starting quarterbacks before turning the keys over to Jimmy Garoppolo at the end of the 2017 season.
With the 49ers trading up to select Trey Lance with the No. 3 overall pick in the 2021 NFL Draft, Garoppolo’s time in the Bay is coming to a close.
Meanwhile, Brady still is going strong at age 44. After winning a Super Bowl in his first season in Tampa Bay, Brady has the Bucs back in the divisional round and one win away from potentially facing Garoppolo and the 49ers in the NFC Championship Game.