Tom Brady didn’t mince words when discussing the current state of the National Football League.
Appearing on The Stephen A. Smith Show this week, Brady blasted the NFL for being “less than what it has been”, saying there’s a lot of “mediocrity” in the league now that didn’t exists when he first started playing.
“I think there’s a lot of mediocrity in today’s NFL. I don’t see the excellence I saw in the past,” Brady said. “I think the coaching isn’t as good as it was, I don’t think the development is as good as it was. The rules have allowed a lot of bad habits to get into the actual performance of the game. I just think the product, in my opinion, is less than what it has been.”
Brady’s overall point seemed to directed at how officiating has changed the game. While he understands that most of those rule changes have been made to keep players healthy, Brady believes the changes have hindered great defensive players from emerging and it has been detrimental to the overall game of football.
“I look at a lot of players like Ray Lewis and Rodney Harrison and Ronnie Lott… every hit they made would’ve been a penalty,” Brady said. “You hear coaches complaining about their own player being tackled… Why don’t they talk to their player about how to protect themself? We used to work on the fundamentals of those things all the time, now they’re trying to regulated all the time. Offensive players need to protect themselves. It’s not up to a defensive player to protect the offensive player.”
here’s a lot of people that would agree with Brady’s assessment.
