New England Patriots Legend Tom Brady Rips Current NFL: 'Mediocrity!'
Tom Brady may be less than a year removed from his second and final retirement from the NFL, but the GOAT already has some concerns about where the league is heading.
In an appearance on The Stephen A. Smith Show, the former New England Patriots and Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback shared some scathing thoughts on the current state of the league.
"I think there's a lot of mediocrity in today's NFL," Brady said. "I don't see the excellence that I saw in the past.
"I don't think the coaching is as good as it was. I don't think the development of the young players 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's been."
Brady runs out of the tunnel in his return to Gillette Stadium with the Buccaneers in 2021.
Brady then went on to make a point about how some of the league's new rules aimed at player safety have actually taken away a lot from the defensive side of the game. He adds that some of the dominant defensive players of his early years wouldn't be able to play the same way today.
"I look at a lot of players like Ray Lewis and Rodney Harrison and Ronnie Lott, guys that impacted the game in a certain way," Brady said. "Every hit they would have made would have been a penalty. You hear coaches complaining about their own player being tackled. Why don't they talk to their player about how to protect themselves? We used to work on the fundamentals of those things all the time. Now they're trying to be regulated all the time."
As an NFL veteran of 23 years, Brady has seen the league change and evolve over nearly a quarter of a century. He has a unique perspective as one of the few players to last that long, and it's hard to deny some of his arguments. If the league decides to actually listen to his critique is another subject entirely, but it's safe to say Brady isn't a fan of where the NFL is heading.
