Tom Brady: Patrick Mahomes’ greatness due to much more than his on-field skill.

Quarterbacks Patrick Mahomes and Tom Brady. PAUL RUTHERFORD Paul Rutherford-USA TODAY Sports A generation from now, football fans may look back at Tom Brady’s career and think he was a superstar from the get-go.

The reality is Brady had to work his way up the depth chart at the University of Michigan and spent much of his senior season platooning with Drew Henson. The Patriots took Brady in the sixth round of the 2000 NFL Draft, and he played sparingly as a rookie.

While on “The Stephen A. Smith Show,” Brady said not being thrown into a starting role as a rookie allowed him more time for development. He said that’s missing from today’s NFL and it hurts young players, particularly quarterbacks.

“The reality is we don’t have the processes in place for those players to be better year after year,” Brady said. “They may maintain. They may be slightly better but not at the improvement levels that we were able to make when I was a younger player through our ability to practice more, we had less distractions.

“There was much more opportunity in the offseason to train. There was more opportunity in training camp to train. There was more opportunity in the regular season to train.”

Brady added that the game has been “dumbed down” to allow young quarterbacks to start as early as possible.

Smith then asked how Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes would have done if he’d have come up in Brady’s era.

Brady said Mahomes would have been even better than he is now. Then Brady talked about what makes Mahomes the best player in the league.

“I think he would be better. He’s already great,” Brady said. “Believe me, he’s, in my opinion, the best quarterback in the NFL.

Why? I could talk about his physicals, because you know why?

When I look at him and I see why he’s great, I see the way that he’s endeared himself to his teammates.

I see the joy they have when they’re out there playing together.

So I love when I see his rapport with his teammates, with his coaches, how he communicates after the game.

I’m listening to the press conferences as much as I’m watching him throw a tight spiral, because that’s ultimately what that position is about.

“Yeah, it’s about your ability to be physically gifted and run and throw on the move and drop his arm angle and read coverages and throw the ball deep.

It’s also about how the message you’re creating every day to your fans, to your teammates, to your coaches, how you present yourself on the field, off the field, how you handle wins and losses. That, to me, is just as important in the development of a player.”

Being a parent and getting older could be thing that affect him as a quarterback, Brady said. “I think the challenge that I see with him as he gets older, he’s not as young as he was, and can he relate to the young players? I believe he will,” Brady said.

“He’s now had a degree of successes that continue to motivate him. That’s going to be up to him. There’s going to be a lot of things that now happen in his life, with his children and as he grows, that are probably external from football. How does he deal with those?

I believe he’s got a good foundation to deal with those.” ALEX SMITH’S INFLUENCE In a way, Mahomes earlier this month confirmed Brady’s assertion about young quarterbacks being thrown into the mix.

During a SiriusXM Town Hall from Chiefs training camp, Mahomes said last week that former Chiefs quarterback Alex Smith’s preparation was a game-changer.

Mahomes saw that when he made his first start in Week 17 of the 2018 season at Denver. “I always give this man his flowers, and I truly mean it,” Mahomes said of Alex Smith.

“I came in I don’t say immature, but I came in and I was just relying on my talent is what I always think about.

I relied on ‘I can make stuff happen.’ I’ll show up and we’ll just play football. And then I watched how Alex worked, and I was like, let me just try to do some of that stuff. And I remember working all year long, and I’m not playing, but I’m working.

Alex is in. I’m just going to try to just learn as much as possible.

“And that Week 17 game I played, and I remember being like, ‘Man, when you work like this, and know what you’re going to do before the snap, it makes everything easier.’

And so that was the process that I still do. I don’t know if you know, but I still do the exact same process that he was doing that first year.

I’m teaching it to all the new guys, and they do the same thing with me.

And his blueprint of how to be a successful quarterback in the NFL is what I picked up on.”