More than a decade ago, there was plenty of discussion regarding Tom Brady not being able to both throw the ball and catch it, too. The topic suggested that Brady has a problem with receivers dropping passes.
On Monday night, Brady said he doesn’t.
“It’d be like me calling the wrong play or checking to the wrong play,” Brady told Jim Gray on the latest episode of the Let’s Go! podcast, via a partial transcript provided by SiriusXM. “I mean, it’s like saying -- I know there’s a lot more people that probably play golf than play football -- but if you hit a bad shot, you hit a bad shot. But I think the problem comes when you make the wrong decision before the club’s in your hand, you know?
“So if you make the wrong decision before you even step up to the play, you don’t even give yourself a chance. So that’s when I have a problem. If we don’t know what to do or we don’t know how to do it, both of those are problems. If we make a physical mistake, I can live with a physical mistake. I can live with a drop. I can live with a missed block. And, you know, if I throw bad passes and I miss my mark, I know the receivers can live with that. I think the problem is if we’re doing the wrong thing from a communication standpoint, whether that’s me communicating poorly or the backs or the line and you have unblocked people or you have things that just don’t go right, you don’t even give yourself a chance, really an unforced error, that’s what we need to eliminate. In football, we always say you can’t win until you can keep from losing. And to keep from losing means you have to do the right thing before the play even starts. You have to be on the same page with the people next to you because it’s a coordinated effort. We’re all in it together and everyone’s got to be on the same page.”
It’s an important distinction. No player wants to drop a pass. No player tries to drop a pass. But the time that point in the play arrives, it’s all automatic. The question is whether players are sufficiently prepared and focused to do what needs to be done on a given play.
