When the G.O.A.T. speaks about the state of today’s game, the NFL would be well advised to listen.
Retired quarterback Tom Brady, the best to ever play the game, blasted the NFL in an appearance Monday on “The Stephen A. Smith Show.” The 7-time Super Bowl champion pointed to rules governing the game to say there is “a lot of mediocrity” passing as football.
“I think there’s a lot of mediocrity in today’s NFL,” Brady said. “I don’t see the excellence that I saw in the past.”
Tom Brady is NOT impressed with the NFL product today
pic.twitter.com/Y0dpWe81uX— Barstool Sports (@barstoolsports) November 21, 2023
“I think the coaching isn’t as good as it was. I don’t think the development of young players is as good as it was. I don’t think the schemes are as good as they were,” he continued. “I think the rules have allowed a lot of bad habits to get into the actual performance of the game. So I just think the product, in my opinion, is less than what it’s been.”
The dirty little secret here is that the NFL has changed dramatically under Commissioner Roger Goodell, who replaced retiring Paul Tagliabue in 2006. In today’s game, the rules favor the offensive in the pursuit of high-scoring games while hitting is all but outlawed. Brady was chosen in the sixth round of the 2000 NFL draft by the New England Patriots.
“I look at a lot of players like Ray Lewis and Rodney Harrison and Ronnie Lott and guys that impacted the game in a certain way, and every hit they would’ve made would’ve been a penalty,” Brady said. “You hear coaches complaining about their own player being tackled and not necessarily — why don’t they talk to their player about how to protect himself?”
“We used to work on the fundamentals of those things all the time. Now they’re trying to be regulated all the time,” he added.
Brady insisted that offensive players need to protect themselves, before admitting that he altered his own play for that very reason.
“It’s not up to the defensive player to protect an offensive player. A defensive player needs to protect himself. I didn’t throw the ball to certain areas because I was afraid players were going to get knocked out. That’s the reality. I didn’t throw it to the middle when I played Ray Lewis, because he’d knock [the receiver] out of the game, and I couldn’t afford to lose a good player.”
Social media was also a topic of concern, as Brady warned young players, “Your social media account isn’t gonna determine how long your career is.”
“When we were young, for me to get on the cover of Sports Illustrated like my idol Michael Jordan was a big deal. So man, I had to do a lot of good things over the course of an NFL season to get recognition to be on the cover of a Sports Illustrated,” he explained.
“Now people have — these young athletes have — hundreds of thousands, sometimes over a million-plus people following them on their social accounts, and they think that there’s something sustainable about that, because you have people paying attention to you,” Brady continued. “But we used to be paid attention for excellence, not for making ourselves to get some moment that people can see us being like a jackass. OK we’re gonna pay attention to that because he jumped off a balcony into a pool. Like OK, yeah, that may get a lot of clicks, but in the end, there’s nothing sustainable about your excellence in that.”
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Tom Tillison grew up in Maryland before moving to Central Florida as a young teen. It is in the Sunshine State that he honed both his passion for politics and his writing skills. Tillison also contributes to BizPac Review.
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