When the GOAT talks about the state of the game today, the NFL should listen.
Retired quarterback Tom Brady, the greatest to ever play the game, tore apart the NFL in an appearance Monday on “The Stephen A. Smith Show.” The 7-time Super Bowl champion pointed to the rules governing the game to say there is “a lot of mediocrity” going on in football.
“I think there’s a lot of mediocrity in the NFL today,” Brady said. “I don’t see the excellence that I saw in the past.”
Tom Brady is NOT impressed with the product of the NFL today
pic.twitter.com/Y0dpWe81uX— Barstool Sports (@barstoolsports) November 21, 2023
“I think the training is not 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 creep into the actual performance of the game. So I think the product, in my opinion, is less than it has been.”
The dirty little secret here is that the NFL has changed dramatically under commissioner Roger Goodell, who replaced the retired Paul Tagliabue in 2006. In today’s game, the rules favor the offense in pursuit of high-scoring games, while hitting is practically forbidden. Brady was selected 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 who impacted the game in a certain way, and every shot they would have taken would have been a penalty,” Brady said. “You hear coaches complaining about their own player being tackled and not necessarily, why aren’t they talking to their player about how to protect themselves?”
“We used to work on the fundamentals of these 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 game for that very reason.
“It is not up to the defensive player to protect an offensive player. A defensive player must protect himself. I didn’t throw the ball in certain areas because I was afraid the players would get knocked out. This is the reality. I didn’t throw it up the middle when I played Ray Lewis, because he would knock [the receiver] out of the game, and I couldn’t afford to lose a good player.”
Social media was also a concern, with Brady warning young players, “Your social media account is not going to determine how long your career lasts.”
“When we were young, for me to be 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 the recognition to be on the cover of a Sports Illustrated,” he explained.
“Now people have, these young athletes, hundreds of thousands, sometimes over a million people following them on their social accounts, and they think there’s something sustainable about that, because there are people paying attention to you Brady continued. . “But we used to get attention for excellence, not to get us to a point where people can see us as an ass. Okay, we’ll give him attention because he jumped from a balcony to a pool. Like, yeah, that might get a lot of clicks, but in the end, there’s nothing sustainable about your excellence in that.”
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