TRANSCRIPT: Tom Brady’s Commencement Speech at Georgetown
Tom Brady's Georgetown Commencement: Conquering Your 28-3 Moments
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Here’s what Tom Brady had to say during his commencement speech at Georgetown University:
“Love you too. So yeah, I usually don’t do well with compliments, so Egon [Durban], thank you so much. I had a coach for 20 years that told me how sh***y I was every day. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d be giving a commencement speech, but Professor [Michael] O’Leary, thank you so much. I appreciate the kind words. Egon, for your vision, and generosity in the creation of the Durbin Sports Business Program. It is a privilege to be here with you all today in the nation’s capital at Georgetown’s McDonough.”
“Relationships and memories are built on shared experience, so I’m grateful to be able to share this experience with you and with the faculty and the staff who educated you and with the family and friends in the audience who proudly supported you getting to this moment, even the ones who are Jets fans. You know who you are. Sitting here looking out at this amazing crowd of business majors getting ready to start your careers, I realized something. Sports was a very strange way to make a living. People screamed at me all the time. They gambled on my performance, and they celebrated all my failures.”
“One way that sports is a lot like business, though, is that when you do it long enough, your life gets defined by numbers. 23, that was the number of pro seasons I played. 7, those were the Super Bowl wins. 3, those were the Super Bowl losses. Damn it, Eli Manning. I heard that back there. But here’s a number for you guys. 99.7. What’s that number make you think of? It’s an A+. I didn’t get many of those. It’s a low-grade fever, maybe. But it’s also virtual certainty. If something has a 99.7% chance of happening, the outcome is a foregone conclusion. Well, let me take you back to February 5th, 2017. Super Bowl 51, Patriots versus Falcons. Excuse my language at some points here. I was an athlete, so you might feel like you’re in a locker room a little bit. There’s 6 minutes left in the third quarter, and we’re losing 28-3, and it’s fourth down at midfield. And at that moment, the Falcons had a 99.7% chance of winning. Not exactly how I thought things would go when I woke up that morning. But you know what? It happens sometimes. You guys are going to see that.”
“You’re going to think that you’re better than your competition, you’re going to work really hard, and it’s still not going to go the way you want. You’re going to find yourself on the short end of that 99.7%, wondering just how the hell you got there. My Patriots team got there by fumbling the second play of the second quarter, and then right before halftime, somebody threw a devastating pick-six. Look, it’s not important who threw it. The point is, it was thrown, so I’ll move on. The Falcons team was really young. They had a new coach. We were the veteran team. We had the Hall of Fame coach. We’d been there before. We’d already won 4 Super Bowls at that point. But the experience or reputation only takes you so far. And it’s true beyond sports. History is littered with businesses, mature ones, that took their competition for granted and then got disrupted by ambitious young entrepreneurs. Do you guys remember Blockbuster, Kodak, Nokia, BlackBerry? I didn’t think so. Maybe some of your parents did. The point is, nothing is guaranteed. We were the favorites going into the game, and now with 8 minutes and 31 seconds left in the third quarter, down 25 points, we were the underdogs, and I found myself on the bench staring blankly at the ground in front of me in very deep thought.”
“With fate seemingly already decided, I was asking myself, ‘What can I do to get us back in this game?’ I had to trust my ability and harness whatever optimism I still had, even if it was just 0.3%. I had to draw on all my experience and all the lessons I’d learned from overcoming years, years of fear and doubt. And the question I have for you graduates today is, ‘How much doubt and how much fear have you faced in your own life?’ College can be a little bit of a cocoon sometimes. So maybe you haven’t found the limits of your ability or the boundaries of your comfort zone yet, and you don’t know what’s possible on the other side of them. Trust me when I tell you, overcoming fear and doubt in the face of those challenges is where you’re going to gain the confidence to make your best choices when things aren’t going the way you want. When the odds are stacked against you, when you’re facing your own 28-3 moment, and believe me, it’s coming, you’ll have a choice to make: to quit or to fight your ass off.”
“The choice seems pretty obvious, and it’s easier said than done. I mean, why expend all that energy fighting when it’s virtually certain you’ll lose? Why not quit and live to fight another day? Well, sometimes there isn’t another day. Super Bowl 51 there was no other day. That was it. With a lot of the most important moments in your lives, when you have a chance to do something truly special, it’s gonna be the same way. You may only get one chance to impress your boss or land a promotion or to close a deal or not. So what then? You better have prepared yourself in advance to deal with the adversity you’re gonna face in order to give yourself the best chance to succeed. Down by 25 in the biggest game of my life, do you think I just stumbled randomly into my decision to keep fighting? The previous 25 years of my life had prepared me for that moment. Just as you guys have been meeting the daily challenges of being a student, I had been meeting the daily challenges of being an athlete every day just for a chance to do something special. The whole reason I went to Michigan was the idea of taking my abilities to an elite program and seeing if I could compete with the best.”
“A lot of you made a similar choice coming to Georgetown, and you’re gonna make it again going out on your own or in jobs with great institutions like Deloitte or Goldman or Google or many others. And these places, guess what? They’re gonna challenge you to be your best. And you better be prepared. I fought really hard at Michigan. I fought even harder to stay there, and I competed against a lot of guys who were just as good as me, if not better. I didn’t get a chance to start until my fourth season. It was tough. It had me questioning whether I was at the right school. Maybe Michigan was too tough. Where you choose to work might also seem too hard for you. You’ll be up against a lot of people from equally great schools who are just as smart and talented as you, and they want it as much as you do. You’ll be asked to do things you’ve never done before, to work long hours, harder than you ever have, with people you might not like, like guys from Duke. But what makes it too hard is exactly the thing that makes it the perfect place for you, because it will offer you the greatest opportunity of all, the opportunity to face your own fears and doubts and develop the skills and abilities necessary to overcome any obstacle you’ll face on the path to being successful in life.
“And this is the key: you don’t quit, and you don’t make excuses. Every hard choice is a brick in the path toward the life you want, but every excuse is a brick in the wall that will stand in your way. When the opportunity to do something special presents itself, the people most prepared to meet the challenges will be the ones who’ve made the most hard choices, who faced adversity and overcome it. They certainly wouldn’t have won all their fights, but they never quit. I stayed at Michigan, and then I got chosen in the 6th round of the 2000 draft. My numbers were pretty unimpressive. If there was a 99.7% chance at anything, it’s that I’d be behind the counter at Ben’s Chili Bowl before I was behind center in an NFL game. And who knows, that could have been fun too. But no one could have imagined that I would end my career with 7 world championships. Maybe because none of those people knew that I would never, ever quit.”
“Which brings me back to Super Bowl 51, on that sideline, down 28-3, with a choice. Our team had worked too hard, we’d come too far. I said to myself, and excuse me for saying this, I’m taking you inside my helmet at a very vulnerable time in my life, in one of the biggest moments of my life, and that inner self-talk that people talk about that should be positive, you know what I said? I said to myself, ‘Don’t be a little bitch. Go out there and fight your ass off. Whether you win or lose, fight to the end.’ At that moment, we had no idea what the outcome of the game would be, but the one thing I’ve learned through sports is the only time you’re sure to lose is when you quit. In life and work, you guys are gonna get knocked down a lot. How are you gonna navigate those moments? Are you gonna push through the self-doubt? Are you gonna face the fear? Will you work relentlessly to the very end even when the outcome is virtually certain? I hope you do because this is the prep work for the bigger opportunities to come. The whole point of doing hard things is to build resilience and the skills to overcome adversity. It’s to teach you how to find your own pathways to success. This is where you get the self-confidence to overcome your next biggest challenge. And you do it the same way you overcome a 25-point deficit: one decision at a time, one play at a time.”
“Understanding this served me well on every step of my journey, including that step into the huddle, on that 4th down with the outcome of the Super Bowl, 99.7% guaranteed that we lose. We called the play, it was a little square out to Danny Amendola. Danny went undrafted out of Texas Tech. He was cut by 3 NFL teams. He wasn’t the tallest, he wasn’t the fastest, but he had a huge heart. And he played his ass off in the biggest moments. And I hope you guys find colleagues like Danny. Having business school friends are great, don’t get me wrong, but sometimes you need a kid from a glorified community college who can bail your ass out of any jam. If you want to achieve great things, surround yourself with people like him. Danny snatched that ball out of the air on fourth down, he took it up the sideline for a first down, and 7 plays later, We were in the end zone, 28-9.”
“99.7% chance of losing just went down to 98.9%. Wow.”
“Now it was the defense’s turn. They forced Atlanta to punt. Now it’s the fourth quarter. We go 72 yards just for a field goal. Now we’re losing, 28-12. 3 plays later, our defense is on the field and boom, We strip sack Matt Ryan. Our defense comes up with a huge turnover. Alan Branch, one of my Michigan, former teammate, jumps on the ball. With 6 minutes left, I hit Danny again, this time for a touchdown.”
“The odds of Atlanta winning: 92.1%.”
“30 minutes earlier, I was thinking, ‘Don’t be a bitch.’ Now I’m thinking, ‘Lock in. Laser focus. We got this.'”
“Kicking the ball back to Atlanta with 5:56 to play, we had the answers to the problems that the Falcons presented as long as we didn’t run out of time. We just had to run the right plays, move fast, and execute and make very good choices. My career was filled with challenges and choices, with small opportunities to show people, including myself, what I was capable of. My hope is that you’ve already had a few of these moments as well, and I hope you’ve already begun to try things that are very hard with long odds. I hope your failures have forced you to find new pathways to success. I hope they force you out of your comfort zone and show you the boundaries in your life that are there to be broken through. And my challenge to you is to always keep fighting. Because the truth is, the way you overcome a 99.7% chance of losing in the biggest moments of your life is to harness the confidence you built and the lessons you’ve learned from a lifetime of failing at things that you’ve cared about.”
“Everything you’ve been through up to this point in your life has been trial and error. It’s been preparation for your next big challenge, your 28-3 moment. Down by 8, we got the ball back with 3:30 left to play. The game was still very much in Atlanta’s favor, and I understood victory was very unlikely even in the moment. I’m an optimist, but I can also do math. I didn’t go to Georgetown, but I knew the numbers were not on our side. 96.5% chance of losing. Still.”
“But then we put together the drive of our lives. Everyone contributed. Chris Hogan, undrafted, played lacrosse in college, ran a perfect route, and converted a huge third down. Malcolm Mitchell from Georgia, another fourth-rounder, tripped over his own feet, fell down, got up, managed to catch a ball, and run forward for a first down on the next play. On the next play, Julian Edelman, a seventh-rounder, a converted quarterback who did everything asked of him for 3 years before he ever saw the field as a wide receiver, made the single most amazing catch I’ve ever seen.”
“All 3 of those guys had a chip on their shoulder. Absolutely. They had something to prove. And boy, did they prove it.”
“When we scored with less than a minute to go and converted the 2-point try to tie the game, the win probability finally flipped. 53% us. In overtime, we marched down the field and at the Atlanta 2-yard line, I flipped the ball out to James White, a 4th-round pick who didn’t play his first year. James was as tough and as resilient as they come. Wherever you’re headed in your next— in your life, find someone like James to be friends with. You’re gonna need gladiators like him along the way. He barreled through half of a deflated Falcons defense to put the ball in the end zone and secure our 5th Super Bowl title.”
“What 90 minutes earlier was set to go down as the worst defeat of my life, the most embarrassing game I ever played in, turned into the most memorable victory of my NFL career.”
“Now, the odds are your 28-3 moment won’t end with a trophy or a parade. It may not even end in victory. It almost didn’t for us. But that’s not really the point. These are all just momentary tests where failure isn’t final, only quitting is. The choice to fight is an opportunity to succeed, yes, but it’s also your chance to grow, to show everyone that while you may be beatable, you are unbreakable. Sometimes in life, you have to put the numbers aside and ignore the odds. You have to make the tough choice. You have to try your best and to fight your hardest to win, because the only thing worse than losing the biggest game of your life is losing respect for yourself along the way.”
“I wish you nothing but the best of luck and the most courageous of choices on your journey. And I challenge you as graduates of this amazing institution to seek out more things that are just too hard. Things that will force you to grow beyond what you thought was possible for yourself, physically, mentally, or emotionally. I want you to challenge yourself with ideas that are uncomfortable and people who push you to be your very best. Even if one of those people is a cranky old coach who cuts the sleeves off his sweatshirt and screams at you all day, ‘Do your job!’ Okay, that’s too specific in my experience. You guys get the point.”
“The tests are over in school, thank God. But the tests in life? They never end. You will be tested every day, and those tests are the prep for the life that you want to live. My story can become your story, but yours will be unique, written by you. Remember this: testing your greatness always comes in the form of a contest where preparation meets opportunity, and the winner is the one who just won’t quit.”
“Thank you so much. Congratulations.”
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