Tom Brady was “hard to coach, but in a good way”

Patriots

Although Bill Belichick's full-time media profession is now coming to an end as he’s the pinnacle coach of the University of North Carolina football team, the previous Patriots leader still offers some insight because the NFL playoffs head into conference championship weekend.

Belichick, 72, recently reflected on how he used to educate legendary quarterback Tom Brady and the way he thinks in regards to the league's hiring plan for open positions.

Speech during an episode of “Let's go!On the podcast, Belichick was joined by Brady and his co-host Jim Gray. The topic of Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes was brought up and how valuable it can be for the team's best player to also be one of the hardest working (and one who accepts criticism along with everyone else).

“Mahomes and Brady are two great, great leaders, and what a great leader does is he helps make everyone better,” Belichick explained when asked to compare the two quarterbacks. “I think Patrick and Tom both did and are doing that. I think when it's your best player, be it a Michael Jordan or a Tom Brady or Patrick Mahomes, if he expects more from himself and he's already the best player and the best performing player, then he expects more from himself, Do you know? , no one wants to let them down.

“And everyone realizes that when they work harder, I have to work harder because I know I didn't perform as well as they did,” Belichick noted. “So it’s a great message. It's a great tour. It’s a great humility, and I think humility as a leader goes a long way in taking the rest of your teammates to higher levels.”

On the specific topic of Brady, the coach who popularized the phrase “no days off” acknowledged that his quarterback was somehow the inspiration for an even greater work ethic.

“Every meeting I was in, I felt like I had to be as prepared as he was,” Belichick remembers. “I remember a number of meetings where I said, 'Well, Tom, you understand, I haven't really seen this yet.' And Tom was all the time good at it, he let me down easily, but he might say, “Well, I think I saw that in the game against Seattle last year.” And I am going back and take a look at it, yeah, He saw it and I missed it.

“He was hard to coach, but in a good way,” Belichick added. “He made me a better coach.”

Gray followed up by asking Belichick to elaborate on why Brady was “hard to coach.”

“Because he was so well prepared,” Belichick replied. “He made me prepare even harder than I normally would have just to make sure I hadn't missed anything he saw because he might have studied a little more closely than I did. And so it forced me to go back and be more attentive and more detailed than I thought. It was a good thing. It was absolutely a good thing. It made me a better coach.”

One thing Belichick said didn't make him a greater coach was the power to interview while a team's playoffs were still underway.

When asked in regards to the league's current hiring practices – through which teams often seek advice from coaches who’re still involved in one other team's bid to win the Super Bowl – Belichick was blunt.

“I was never a big fan of it,” he began. “I think it's really unfortunate when you have a team, including the coaches and coordinators, [that] They've worked so hard all year to get to the playoffs, to have the opportunity to compete in conference championships and Super Bowls, and then they get completely distracted by another team that was a bad team that has a coaching change has, and who violate it A team trying to reach a championship by hiring one of their top coaches.

“Nobody would be happy if that was a player,” Belichick emphasized. “But it’s also very disturbing for a coach, especially if you’re the game manager. I mean, it's human nature to get distracted by a potential vacancy, personnel, and lifestyle change from coordinator to head coach when you're trying to set up and call plays in a critical game.”

Belichick's Patriots have struggled with such a problem frequently during the team's long winning streak. At the height of the Brady-Belichick dynasty, hardly a season went by without at least one of the team coordinators interviewing for the NFL or college.

In his own case, Belichick cited his first NFL head coaching appointment, which he received after helping the Giants win Super Bowl XXV in 1991. While many modern coaches have to conduct extensive interviews during ongoing playoff runs, Belichick's own start came to New York via the Browns and had successfully completed its postseason run.

“When I took the head job in Cleveland, I didn't apply for the head coaching position – either in Cleveland or in Tampa – until we were done playing, until the Super Bowl was over, after we beat Buffalo.” Belichick recalled. “You will start as a coach at the same time anyway. It's not that, but the distraction that it creates, I think I've been very lucky and I'm glad I didn't have to deal with that.

“So I don’t like it, but it’s not my rule,” he concluded. “It's not my decision. That's why I think it's unfair to the teams that have performed so well and worked so hard to get to this position to have another team that is obviously not a good team that has created its own negative situation by “Generally had to hire a new coach because of their performance is capable of disrupting the team that is trying to win a championship.”