When Tom Brady was selected with the 199th pick by the Patriots in the 2000 NFL Draft, no one envisioned that he would succeed in the pros. Forget even thinking about the number of accolades he’ll win during his career. On the field, he made it look easy, as if everything were second nature to him. For Urban Meyer, that ‘ease’ ends up hiding the thousands of hours he put into his craft.

“When I hear someone say, ‘He’s a natural,’ I would always disagree,” Urban Meyer said during his June 15 appearance on the Breaking Sales Podcast with Dan Lappin. “We’re all natural, and God has gifted us with skill sets. But to say Tom Brady was a natural quarterback, that’s unfair to Tom Brady.”

“Tom Brady worked awfully hard to become a natural. Other guys didn’t work as hard as him, I hate to say it,” Meyer added.

Meyer and Lappin were discussing how players spend 44-45 hours a week just to have the chance to play six to seven minutes a game. That doesn’t even include the hours they put in at training camp or during spring practices.

Unlike Manning or Rodgers, Brady arrived in the pros as an afterthought. He was a late bloomer. He wasn’t mobile, didn’t have the strongest of arms, and a lot of teams gave up on him after they saw him running the 40-yard dash in the NFL Combine.

However, just like he rose through the depth chart at Ann Arbor, the seven-time Super Bowl Champion did the same in New England. That was all possible because of his mental fortitude. And that helped his game, too. He could process faster than his peers. That meant surgical precision. The likes of Julian Edelman and Rob Gronkowski have said that Brady wanted perfect practices. As a result, the actual game became easier.

“When you ask a quarterback to throw this certain pass throughout his time, 10,000 is probably extreme, but is it really? I mean, when you go back in his entire livelihood, he’s thrown that thing thousands of times before he’s asked to do that,” Meyer added.

In his post-NFL avatar, Brady never brings up his accolades. However, he doesn’t hesitate to talk about the drive that set him apart from the rest. For a long stretch in his career, that meant following a strict diet plan. He did that.

Meyer was hired to coach the Jaguars, and that’s when he saw Tom Brady in action. He got a chance to see Brady firsthand during his first season with the Jaguars. It wasn’t an actual game. The former Ohio State head coach saw how much the QB put into his performance during a minicamp in June.

“It was the last day of minicamp. They’re in shorts and helmets, and they’re doing a two-minute drill. And Tom Brady is treating it like it’s the Super Bowl. And he goes down and he scores with two seconds left to win that scrimmage or whatever they had and runs around that field like a child who just won the Super Bowl. That’s how competitive he is,” Meyer told 247Sports in 2021.