Brady tells Raiders rookie Mendoza: Earn your opportunity like everyone else

Tom Brady has a message for Fernando Mendoza, the Raiders' rookie quarterback: your draft position means nothing. Your offseason hype means nothing. You have to earn it.

Brady, who built a Hall of Fame career by proving himself every single Sunday, isn't interested in the usual offseason quarterback fever that surrounds young players. Speaking on FOX Business' "The Claman Countdown," the 48-year-old minority owner of the Raiders was blunt about what he expects from Mendoza and every other rookie entering the league. "He's got to go out there and earn it like everybody else," Brady said. "None of these young players, none of the rookies have ever had a meaningful snap in the NFL."

For Brady, the distinction is crucial. Draft status is just a starting point. What matters is what happens next—the daily work, the way a player responds when things get hard, the kind of teammate he becomes. "Their career and their journey will be determined by the work that they put in, by the adversities that they overcome, by the kind of teammate and team player that they are," Brady explained. It's the philosophy that carried him through two decades in New England and Tampa Bay, and it's the one he's now applying to his newest professional chapter.

Brady recently joined eMed, a digital health company, as Chief Wellness Officer. The move might seem like a departure from football, but Brady sees a direct line between the discipline that made him successful on the field and the mission he's pursuing now. Throughout his playing career, he treated his body as his most valuable asset, surrounding himself with specialists and systems designed to keep him healthy and performing at peak levels. That kind of support—the personalized guidance, the rigorous attention to fundamentals—was available to him because he was an elite athlete. But most people don't have access to that.

"When I retired, I realized that there's a lot of people in life that maybe they're not professional athletes, but to a degree, we all are living athletic lifestyles," Brady said. "We wanna be healthy. We wanna play with our kids. We wanna play with grandkids." His goal at eMed is to democratize the kind of health guidance he relied on, making it accessible to everyday Americans who want to improve their wellness but don't have an NFL-caliber support system behind them.

Brady also highlighted the role that GLP-1 medications have played in helping people start their health journeys. "There's no debate about the way that this medicine is working right now in terms of keeping people and getting people on their wellness journey started," he said. The emphasis, though, remains on the long game—not just starting the journey, but staying on it.

Whether it's competing for the quarterback job or improving your health, Brady sees the same fundamental truth at work: success comes down to accountability, discipline, and showing up for yourself and others. "I realized that a lot of the values that I had as an NFL player transitioned very well to what happens in the workforce," he explained. Those values—the ones that made him a six-time Super Bowl champion—are the ones he's betting will help ordinary people transform their lives. For Mendoza, the message is simple: get to work.