Brady trying not to be the 'grumpy old guy'

BY NICK ST. DENIS

Tom Brady has been around -- 14 years, to be exact.

But the New England Patriots team surrounding the soon-to-be 36-year-old isn't getting any younger, and Monday, he was asked about being patient with those around him considering the experience gap.

"I don’t want to be a grumpy old guy. I think I understand that there’s a learning curve and there’s a patience," Brady told the media. "I think you try to let them know though that there’s an urgency about it, so it’s not like you can afford mistakes. We all make them – I make them myself, I make more than anybody. You’re patient with certain things.

"Mental errors you don’t really want to tolerate and I think those things are always preventable, but they’re going to happen. The physical ones, when you drop a ball, that happens, that’s part of playing. I’m going to miss throws, I’m going to throw interceptions, but I never want to make a wrong read or call a wrong play or snap the ball into a bad look."

The future Hall-of-Famer is throwing and handing off to a pretty youthful cast this training camp. Among others, a pair of rookies draft picks in Aaron Dobson and Josh Boyce are pushing for starting receiver jobs, and the third-year pair of tailbacks in Shane Vereen and Stevan Ridley are poised for bigger roles in 2013.

With that, Brady sounds like an extension of coach Bill Belichick in the way he holds his teammates accountable. But he probably doesn't yell as much.

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