Ryan Shazier didn’t take kindly to an off-the-cuff remark from Tom Brady earlier this season.
During the Monday Night Football “ManningCast” last week, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback made an appearance. At one point, Brady likened defensive players to dogs running around chasing cars.
He delivered it like a joke, but it rubbed some the wrong way. Among them Shazier, who, in an exclusive interview with Yahoo!, explained why that remark was off-putting.
Here’s the excerpt:
“That one got me. I respect him. I think he’s the greatest quarterback in NFL history.
For him to be that good, I think it’s kind of disrespectful to a lot of the players he’s played before in his past. Obviously everybody’s not Tom Brady. I just feel that — for somebody to say that, that’s basically like saying guys on the defensive side of the ball aren’t intelligent enough to play offense. I would beg to differ.
I feel like a lot of guys on the defensive side of the ball that chose to be on defense because, obviously, they like hitting people. But also that they might be really good at diagnosing or understanding plays as well. For him to be somebody that knows the game of football so well, I thought that was a little ignorant.”
Brady will probably tell you he was just joking, and that he had unending respect for defensive players (or something like that). But, you can understand why Shazier and other defensive players might take that as a pretentious remark from the future Hall of Famer.
