Rob Ninkovich on Tom Brady: ‘He’s still got a lot left in the tank’

Now that he’s 41 years old, Tom Brady is seen as entering overtime of a career in which he has established himself as one of the greatest quarterbacks in NFL history.

Some people thought he should, and even expected he would, have walked away after another MVP and Super Bowl season last year.

‘He wants to go for that sixth ring’

Not Rob Ninkovich, one of Brady’s former New England Patriots teammates.

“Last year, Tom was the MVP. What do you say now? ‘Like, yeah, I’m the MVP, I’m good. I’m going to walk away,'” Ninkovich told Brian Custer and Brady Quinn during a recent appearance on the SiriusXM Blitz. “He’s still got a lot left in the tank. He wants to go for that sixth ring, obviously. ‘Blitz for Six,’ all that stuff, the hoopla that’s going on. He has the motivation, he has the skill set right now. He can still make all the throws, we’ve seen it.

‘There’s always been a chance for an injury’

“But in this league, everything is one play away. You could be a 40-year-old quarterback or a 25-year-old quarterback. It doesn’t matter. Everybody’s one play away from an injury. When people say, ‘Oh, it’s going to end badly.’ If it ends in an injury, well, guess what? There’s always been a chance for an injury. Every player on the field has a chance for an injury. Every single snap there’s a risk of injury.”

Ninkovich believes the Brady he saw in 2017 showed no signs of slowing down and the same should be the case this year.

‘You didn’t see any deterioration’

“I just think that, when you see his work from last year, you didn’t see a deterioration,” he said. “You saw a quarterback that threw for, what, 505 (yards) in the Super Bowl? That’s not bad. You would think that, with that many yards and how many points they put on the board that they would have won that game. So it just didn’t work out. I just think that, right now, year by year.

“And I think Tom went away from that, ‘Oh, I can see myself playing until I’m 45.’ He kind of realized that maybe two years ago. I just need to really focus on this year, next year. Every year’s its own, individual year and then we’ll see how it goes.”