One thing was abundantly clear when Cassel arrived in New England: After winning their third Super Bowl in four years, Brady was entrenched as their starting quarterback, so the odds of unseating him were Powerball improbable. But just because you got drafted doesn’t mean you’ve made the team. It’s an opportunity to make a very exclusive living with an average lifespan of 3 years. To make an NFL team’s final 53-man roster is a different story. Before the start of each season, every team conducts a series of camps with 100+ players. Your big stars already have “jobs,” aka positions. The rest are fighting to keep or take someone else’s.

Cassel fought through and made the 53-man roster. He’d survived. But make no mistake, Cassel beat out a flurry of other high-caliber quarterbacks looking for the coveted role as Brady’s backup…for three consecutive years. Over that time, Cassel played sparingly in both pre-season games and at the tail-end of blowouts. As the Patriots went on with their winning ways, Cassel had been part of three consecutive AFC East Division Championships and was part of the unbeaten 2007 squad that famously lost to the New York Giants in Super Bowl XXLI.