"No Days Off"? Not in Tampa Bay.
Former New England Patriots stars Tom Brady and Rob Gronkowski played in a much more lenient atmosphere during their first season with the Buccaneers, as head coach Bruce Arians explained Monday.
“You’ve got to be super involved as a coach, but with (Brady), it’s not about Xs and O’s,” Arians told The Los Angeles Times' Sam Farmer one day after his Bucs defeated the Kansas City Chiefs 31-9 in Super Bowl LV. “It’s making sure he’s comfortable and feels good about the game plan and work week. He’d text me and say, ‘Do you mind if I don’t throw Wednesday?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, I don’t care.’
“I’d ask him, ‘Do you want to take mental reps or do you just want to sit back?’ He’d say, ‘I just need to sit back.’ And we did that two or three times during the season. ...
“Early on, I’d say, ‘Hey, are you taking a day off?’ And he’d say, ‘This will be the last day I ever take off.’ But after a while it was like, ‘Do you mind if I take off Wednesday?’ "
Days off, as Bill Belichick's famous rallying cry clearly indicates, are frowned upon in New England, where healthy starters are expected to take nearly every rep in every practice. Arians prefers a more laid-back approach aimed at keeping his best players fresh for game days.
“Even with Gronk, I’d say, ‘Dude, you’re not practicing on Wednesdays. I need you on Sunday. I don’t need you on Thursday,’ ” Arians told Farmer. “And he was like, 'Oh, man, I’ll be fresh. I’ll be like, super.’ I told him that if he ever needed a day off, he should just let me know. Because he never had days off before.”
That drastic shift appealed to Gronkowski, who grew weary and worn down by the Patriots' demanding practice habits. Recall this 2019 quote from the now-31-year-old tight end:
"Abusing your body isn’t what your brain wants. When your body is abused, it can bring down your mood. You’ve got to be able to deal with that, too, throughout the season. You gotta be able to deal with that in the games. No one realizes that, and everyone expects us players to be wide awake every single day.
"And it’s like, ‘Yo, I just took 50 hits to my head’ -- or not to my head, but I’m saying I just took 50 collisions, and then the next day, everyone wants you to be up. They want you to practice full speed, next week they want the game to be full speed, but they don’t understand sometimes what players are going through with their bodies, with their minds."
Weeks after those remarks, which came during the leadup to Super Bowl LIII, Gronkowski retired from the NFL at age 29. After a year away from the game, he returned last offseason to play with Brady in Tampa.
Both players flourished in Super Bowl LV, with Brady earning Super Bowl MVP honors for the fifth time and Gronkowski catching two of the quarterback's three touchdown passes.
