Tom Brady won’t admit he’s the G.O.A.T.

If you’re talking about the greatest NFL player of all time, Tom Brady has to at least be in the discussion. His resume — which includes five Lombardi Trophies and four Super Bowl MVP awards — demands it. But Brady doesn’t necessarily agree, even after EA Sports put him on the on the cover of the newest Madden, the G.O.A.T. Edition.

”I don’t agree with that, and I’ll tell you why,” Brady said in a recent interview with ESPN’s Ian O’Connor. “I know myself as a player. I’m really a product of what I’ve been around, who I was coached by, what I played against, in the era I played in. I really believe if a lot of people were in my shoes they could accomplish the same kinds of things. So I’ve been very fortunate.”

And if Brady isn’t the greatest NFL player ever, then who is? Brady says that guys like Jim Brown and Lawrence Taylor are in the discussion, but as far as guys he’s played against, it’s not as clear.

“I know that I haven’t played against a lot of those guys,” Brady said, “but I’ve also played against a lot of guys that when I think of Peyton Manning and Marvin Harrison and Dwight Freeney and Jason Taylor and Ray Lewis and Ed Reed and Darrelle Revis — if those guys aren’t the best, then whoever is better than them is only better by percentage points. It’s not a big difference.”

Although Brady doesn’t think he’s necessarily the G.O.A.T. now, it looks like he’ll have plenty of time to change that. Brady still insists he’d like to play until he’s 45 years old.

“I think 45 is a pretty good number for right now,” Brady said. “I know the effort it takes to be 40. ... My love for the sport will never go away. I don’t think at 45 it will go away.”

But Brady also hinted at the fact that he’d rather not be one of those veterans Bill Belichick decides to move on from before Brady is ready to call it a career. The Patriots are keeping quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo around, and it’s conceivable that the team could choose to move on from the best quarterback in franchise history if his play does start to decline.

“At some point, everybody moves on,” Brady said. “Some people don’t do it on their terms. I feel I want it to be on my terms.”

Brady’s football career got off to a fairly inauspicious start. He started out as the seventh-string quarterback at the University of Michigan, and everyone knows that he fell all the way into the sixth round before the Patriots selected him with the 199th pick in the 2000 draft.

But what you may not know is that Brady’s early days in football were just as much of a battle. In the interview, Brady shared that his high school team went 0-8 in his freshman season, and Brady wasn’t good enough to win the starting job even though the guy ahead of him on the depth chart threw just two touchdown passes all season.

Brady certainly wasn’t the G.O.A.T. back then, but he may be wrong about whether he is now.