Jets Rookie Brandin Echols Dismisses Criticism of Tom Brady Autograph Request

In Friday’s Hot Clicks: the silly controversy over Echols’s souvenir, RJ Barrett’s impressive buzzer beater and more.

“It’s good to just relax and live your childhood dream”

Nobody besides the most ardent of Jets supporters could tell you who Brandin Echols was before this week. But after picking off Tom Brady on Sunday and having the GOAT sign the intercepted ball at midfield, the rookie sixth-round pick made plenty of headlines. (Imagine how much more we’d be talking about him if not for Antonio Brown’s antics in that same game.)

Brady himself drew more attention to the autograph request when he discussed it on his Let’s Go! podcast. Brady said Echols was a “nice guy” and found it “kind of flattering” to sign the ball but doesn’t plan on doing it again.

“I don’t necessarily like signing mistakes, let me just say that,” Brady said. “So that’s the last time I’m going to do that. I know it’s the season of giving—I don’t plan on giving any more gifts to people. It’s much better to receive than give from my standpoint as a quarterback.”

I found Echols’s autograph request to be endearing and a great illustration of how revered Brady is, even by those who are theoretically his peers. But not everyone was charmed by the move, like Sal Licata of New York’s WFAN, who called it “beyond pathetic.”

I think its pathetic that a player, Brandin Echols in this case, would ask another player (Brady) for an autograph on field after a game they just lost. Beyond pathetic. Grow up dude.

— Sal Licata (@sal_licata) January 2, 2022

Echols spoke to the media Thursday for the first time since the pick and said he wasn’t worried about people criticizing him.

“I thought it was a normal thing. I thought it was the same thing as getting a jersey swap,” Echols said following Thursday’s practice. “But people made it a bigger deal than it was supposed to be. It didn’t mean nothing to me because I’m just going out doing what I’m doing every week. It’s good to just relax and live your childhood dream.”

Echols did concede that he might have been able to get the ball signed without national TV cameras trained on him.

“It most definitely could have been another way to get that done, but I was just excited to pick off Tom Brady,” he said. “I’ve been watching him since I started realizing what football was. It was a big moment for me, and I was caught up in the moment. And I felt I needed to do it right there.

“Throughout the week I already had it in my head, ‘I’m going to get a pick against Tom Brady’ so when it happened I wanted to get it signed. I spoke it into existence.”

Chalk the public autograph session up to a rookie mistake, but in the end, Echols got what he wanted. And really, he shouldn’t be too worried about what a radio host or some random people on Twitter have to say about him. Coach Robert Saleh said Monday that he didn’t have a problem with Echols's asking for the autograph, even though it was “a little ballsy.”

“I get it, because there’s a lot of fans who watch and care so much about the result of the game, and so they want the players to care and they want to visually see that, so optically, I can understand how people would take offense to it,” Saleh said. “But the reality is, the NFL is a brotherhood. These guys all know each other. They talk to each other on the phone, they work out with one another. This is a huge fraternity of brothers. They just spent four hours going at it on the football field, they spent all week prepping on how to absolutely embarrass one another. So at the end of the game, the jersey exchanges, those conversations that they’re having, that is a very cool, genuine moment that’s happening for players.”

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