With former Colts center Jeff Saturday becoming Colts interim head coach Jeff Saturday, and given that he hopes his opportunity will create other chances for former players to walk through the door as head coach despite having no experience in coaching, it makes sense to wonder which other players could pull it off.
How about Tom Brady?
On Brady’s Let’s Go! podcast, Jim Gray asked Brady whether he could walk in and be a head coach tomorrow, given his 23 years as a player.
“I think that’s an interesting question,” Brady said. “Obviously I have a lot of experience playing, I have a lot of knowledge and there’s, I’d say, a lot of capabilities to doing that. But the desire to do something like that is totally different. So I’ve enjoyed my abilities as a player and I think I’ve had so much intent and focus on being the best I could be as a player. Being a good coach, you have to have a lot of similar traits to what you had as a player, which is preparation, discipline, leadership, work ethic. And if you can put all those things together, yeah, you can obviously be a good coach. And I think a lot of the great coaches in history have done that. I think being a great coach is the desire to be a great coach. You know, not whether a player can become a coach. I think having the knowledge to do football, but is this something that you’d want to do and enjoy in order to maximize and actualize your potential as a coach? Those are things for different people to answer. Some people love being in the arena and some people love talking about it. You know, it’s up for everyone’s desire to do what they want, but to have the opportunity to do it I think is pretty cool for former players as well.”
Brady already has chosen to love getting paid a lot of money to talk about the game ($37.5 million per year), whenever he retires from player. When balancing the pay and the hours of coaching versus broadcasting, Brady is making the smart call. A call that others may be wishing they’d made when they had the chance, such as Rams coach Sean McVay.
Brady definitely could be a coach. But he’d have to be willing to commit his entire life to it, in order to be as successful as he possibly can be. And he’d have to be willing to tolerate trying to teach players who won’t have the same commitment that he did as a player, or that he’d have as a coach -- or he’d have to be able to get them to make that same commitment.
Ultimately, it comes down to how much of your life you’re willing to commit to the profession. That will be the challenge for Saturday. How much total time will he devote to coaching, and will it be enough to beat anyone other than the Raiders?
