Tom Brady retired for the second time after the 2022 season. Next year he will host NFL games with Fox for the first time, earning a salary of $35 million per year. If he approaches this task with the attitude he displayed during an interview with Stephen A. Smith on Monday, he’ll spend a lot of time shaking his fist at football-shaped clouds.
Via TheAthletic.com, Brady said that there is “a lot of mediocrity in today’s NFL.”
Of course there is. Because everything we did before was always better when we did 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 used to be. I don’t think the plans are as good as they were. The rules have allowed many bad habits to seep into the actual performance of the game. . . . So I just think in my opinion the product is worse than what it was.”
Brady continued to rail 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 who influenced the game in a certain way – and any goal they would have taken would have been a penalty,” Brady said. “You hear coaches complaining about their own player being attacked, and not necessarily – why don’t they talk to their player about how to protect themselves? . . . We’ve been working on the fundamentals of these things all along. Now they’re constantly trying to be regulated.”
Of course, Brady constantly looked for flags whenever he got hit. Sometimes he caught them when he wasn’t supposed to and at the same time got away with kicking the guy who hit him.
“Offensive players have to protect themselves,” Brady said. “It’s not a defensive player’s job to protect an offensive player. A defensive player has to protect himself. . . . I think the way the rules came into play has largely enabled this – you can basically play carefree and then if you hit hard there is a penalty.”
He has a right to his opinion. At some point, however, anyone who wants to complain about what the game has become needs to either shut up or stop watching. They won’t change the rules to make the game less safe. Brady will run into windmills if he uses his Fox platform to whine about penalties on defenses and offensive players not protecting themselves.
Seriously, if he has a problem with the rules, why would he want to cancel the games? Why not create a league that uses the rules he wishes were still part of the NFL?
We can’t have it both ways. Either we want a safer game or we want an open season. You can’t want a safe game and then complain about the impact of 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 as it currently is, maybe he should do something different with his Sundays during football season.