Tom Brady is reportedly not impressed with the standard of play in the NFL right now, less than a year after ending his illustrious playing career.
“I think there’s a lot of mediocrity in today’s NFL. I don’t see the excellence that I saw in the past,” Brady said during an appearance Monday on “The Stephen A. Smith Show.”
Brady, who ended his record-breaking 23-year career earlier this year, gave many reasons for his assessment of the game, including player development and coaching.
“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.”
The NFL is seeing a decline in scoring for the fourth straight year (2023); teams are only scoring 43.3 points per game this year, compared to 43.8 last season and 45.9 in 2021. The average scoring season in the league will be the lowest since 2009, when teams scored 42.9 points per game on average.
The high rate of quarterback injuries is probably one factor contributing to the scoring decline. Leading franchise quarterbacks who have sustained season-ending injuries include Joe Burrow, Kirk Cousins, Deshaun Watson, and Anthony Richardson. Other quarterback stars, such as Aaron Rodgers and Kyler Murray, have also missed a significant amount of time.
Brady accepted that football is a physically demanding sport, but he disapproved of recent rule modifications meant to shield players from harm.
“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.
“Offensive players need to protect themselves. 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.”
The all-time leader in passing yards and touchdown passes in the NFL is Brady, 46. The three-time league MVP and seven-time Super Bowl victor stated that he believes “the athletes have changed much” since he began his NFL career in 2000, citing collegiate progress as evidence of this.
“I actually think college players were better prepared when I came out than they are now,” he said. “Just because so many coaches are changing programs, and I would say there’s not even a lot of college programs anymore. There’s a lot of college teams, but not programs that are developing players.
“So as they get delivered to the NFL, they may be athletic, but they don’t have much of the skills developed to be a professional. When I played at Michigan, I essentially played at a college program that was very similar to a pro environment. When I see these different players come in, they’re not quite as prepared as they were, and I think the game has shown that over the last 12 to 13 years. I think things have slipped a little bit.”