Tom Brady retired for the second time after the 2022 season. Next year, he’ll be calling NFL games for the first time with Fox, at a salary of $35 million per year. If he approaches that task with the attitude he displayed during a Monday interview with Stephen A. Smith, he will spend a lot of time shaking his fist at football-shaped clouds.
Via TheAthletic.com, Brady said there is “a lot of mediocrity in today’s NFL.”
Of course there is. Because everything we used to do was always better when we were doing it.
“I think the coaching isn’t as good as it was,” Brady said. “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. 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.”
Brady continued his rant against rule changes that make the game safer, but also make offensive players less inclined to protect themselves.
“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 have made would have 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.”
Of course, Brady was constantly looking for flags whenever he got hit. Sometimes he’d get them when he shouldn’t, while also getting away with kicking the guy who hit him.
“Offensive players need to protect themselves,” Brady said. “It’s not up to a defensive player to protect an offensive player. A defensive player needs to protect himself. . . . I think a lot of the way that the rules have come into play have allowed this — you can essentially play carefree and then if anyone hits you hard, there’s a penalty.”
He’s entitled to his opinion. At some point, however, anyone who is inclined to complain about what the game has become needs to either shut up or stop watching it. They won’t be changing the rules to make the game less safe. Brady will be tilting at windmills if he chooses to use his Fox platform to whine about penalties against the defense and offensive players not protecting themselves.
Seriously, if he has a problem with the rules, why would he want to call the games? Why not start a league that uses the rules that he wishes were still part of the NFL?
We can’t have it both ways. Either we want a safer game or we want open season. You can’t want a safe game and then whine about the impact of the efforts to make the game safer.
Hopefully, Brady will figure that out before September. And if he doesn’t think he can accept the game for what it currently is, maybe he should do something else with his Sundays during football season.
