Tom Brady is a person.
American football , referred to as football in the United States and Canada , and also known as `` gridiron football '' or simply `` gridiron '' , is a sport played by two teams of eleven players on a rectangular field with goalposts at each end . Thomas Edward Patrick Brady Jr. ( born August 3 , 1977 ) is an American football quarterback for the New England Patriots of the National Football League ( NFL ) . After playing college football for the University of Michigan , Brady was drafted by the Patriots in the sixth round of the 2000 NFL Draft . In Brady 's 15 seasons as a starter , he has quarterbacked the Patriots to seven Super Bowl appearances , the most for any player in history . For his alleged involvement in the highly publicized Deflategate football tampering scandal , Brady was suspended for the first four games of the 2016 NFL season .