This story originally appeared on Draft Wire.
Tom Brady just proved once again that he’s the GOAT of NFL quarterbacks, winning his seventh Super Bowl in just his first season with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
As every other team in the league searches for the second coming of Brady, ESPN’s Mel Kiper thinks there are similarities between the legendary quarterback and one of the top passers in the 2021 NFL draft class, Alabama’s Mac Jones.
Per ESPN’s Mike Reiss, Kiper says Jones has some of the intangible traits that have made Brady successful over the past two-plus decades:
I hate to say, but he kind of has a little bit of [Tom] Brady in him. I’m not saying he’s ever going to be Tom Brady. He wouldn’t be close, probably. But he has that competitiveness, and he’s so smart — he picked that offense up [at the Senior Bowl] like it was nothing. Other quarterbacks were struggling with the verbiage and — ‘boom!’ — he was in and out of the huddle quicker than anybody I’ve ever seen.
Then he sees the field. He’s tremendously accurate to all levels. He doesn’t have the ‘wow’ arm, like Brady didn’t either coming into the league. And like Brady, he’s not real mobile, not a runner. But biding time, slipping and sliding, he did it in the championship game. So there are some similarities there.
Kiper’s caveat is the important part here, because expecting any prospect to ever become what Brady has is a fool’s errand. That said, some NFL decision-makers are sure to fall in love with the positives in Jones’ scouting report, and the fact that they lead analysts like Kiper to draw these kinds of comparisons between the two.
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