No one is off limits when it comes to criticism from Bill Belichick — not even arguably the greatest quarterback who’s ever lived.
Belichick and Tom Brady have been working together for 19 NFL seasons, six of which concluded with Super Bowl championships. But despite the unprecedented success, both on a personal level and for the New England Patriots as a whole, Brady still can catch an earful from Belichick.
Martellus Bennett on Wednesday shed light on Brady and Belichick’s working dynamic. The former tight end was a bit taken aback when he first saw Belichick rip into his star quarterback, but it was in that moment Bennett knew the 2016 Patriots were found for something special.
“A crazy thing I saw, one day we were at practice and the defense is crushing us. Like we can’t complete no passes. You know, sometimes they do the install and it’s just the right install,” Bennett said on FS1’s “First Things First.” “So we come into the meeting and Bill always has the bad plays of the day and he’s just like calling out Tom. You know, like, ‘We have quarterbacks that can’t make throws.’ I’m like ‘This is Tom Brady. He can make all the throws.’ And I’ve never seen coaches really call out the quarterbacks in group meetings. I sit right behind Tom because I’m the quarterback whisperer. I like to whisper in their ear when I see things. So after that meeting, I go to finish my workout or whatever and Tom is in there doing dropbacks. He’s just throwing dropbacks — he’s pissed off. The next day we go 33-for-33 or something like that at practice and from then I was just like, ‘Oh, we’re gonna be great.’ I’ve never seen anyone that didn’t shut down. He was like, ‘All right, I’m gonna show you tomorrow.’ He just picked them apart.”
Brady truly is never satisfied, and despite his remarkable body of work, he’s still looking for ways to improve. Take, for example, a recent offseason workout that saw Brady lament leaving a deep pass to Julian Edelman a yard short. And given how attentive to detail he has, we have a feeling Belichick would have offered a similar reaction had he been on hand for the training session.
Can this be viewed as excessive? Sure. But it’s what’s paved the way for the Patriots’ sustained success over the past two decades.
