In today’s game, Tom Brady doesn’t believe young quarterbacks are getting the coaching that he received early in his career.
On “The Herd,” Colin Cowherd posited to Brady that by Thanksgiving of a quarterback’s second season, evaluators know whether the young signal-caller can play.
The seven-time Super Bowl champion pushed back hard on that idea.
“There are a lot of people who have no idea what they’re doing when they’re tasked with coaching a quarterback or calling an offense,” Brady said.
Brady said quarterbacks are often ranked, but nobody ever discusses the 32nd-best offensive coordinator. He then drew on his own experience with terrific coaching in New England to illustrate his point.
“I sat behind Drew (Bledsoe), who was a franchise quarterback, right?” Brady began. “In my second year, it’s training camp and we had a very good quarterback coach named Dick Rehbein, and God rest his soul, unfortunately he passed away in training camp of a heart attack. It was a very difficult loss for our team. The way that we found a way to continue on that season was Bill Belichick became more of a quarterback coach than we ever imagined.”
Belichick wasn’t just sitting in the back of quarterback meetings, either. Brady offered a deep dive into just how impactful Belichick’s coaching was in his development.
“He decided to come in every week and talk to the quarterbacks about coverage. He would do these big write ups and I still have them all because I kept everything,” Brady said. “‘Tom, this is Cover 1, this is how they play it, this is who is responsible for who. OK, if we line up in a bunch formation, this is how they’re going to handle the bunch formation. This is why they do that. This is the weakness of that, why they do that. You shouldn’t do this if this is how they cover it. OK, this is Cover 2. This is how they cover. They play two variations of Cover 2. When they’re in this variation, this is what they’re trying to stop. When they’re in this variation, this is what they’re trying to stop. OK, this is Cover 4. This is how this team uniquely plays Cover 4. We shouldn’t line up in this formation to try to run this concept.’
“That’s how I developed and learned, ‘Oh (expletive), defense calls a certain play, this is how we can put them in this formation and it can back the coverage off and I’ll have a short throw underneath. Oh great, I love that. Let’s do that.’ Nobody is getting that type of development!”
Brady then underscored the holistic nature of gaining knowledge from everybody in a well-run organization.
“I learned from an offensive standpoint watching Drew and having very good offensive coaches,” Brady said. “Then I had a defensive coach — the best one of all time — teach me how to read defenses. Then I would go out and meet with player personnel people who were very talented. We’d go through the entire defensive lineup... that’s development.”
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