BOSTON — For quite some time, Tom Brady has stressed that the onus is often on quarterbacks to protect wide receivers by not throwing them into danger. Some news on Monday prompted Brady to reiterate his stance.
After seeing that the NFL had suspended Steelers safety Damontae Kazee for the remainder of the season, Brady chimed in on the SportsCenter Instagram account.
“Nobody likes seeing players get hurt. But hard hits happen. QBs should not be throwing the ball in areas where they are exposing their own teammates to these types of hits,” Brady wrote in a comment. “Coaches need to coach better, QBs needs to read coverages and throw the ball to the right places and defenders should aim for the right hitting areas. To put the blame on the [defensive] player all the time is just flat-out wrong. Need better QB play!! It’s not OK QBs to get your WRs hit because of your bad decisions!”
The hit in question came when wide receiver Michael Pittman Jr. had to lay out in a full extension to try to catch a pass from Gardner Minshew.
Kazee was penalized on the play and ejected from the game on Saturday, before receiving word of his suspension on Monday.
Last month, in a conversation with Stephen A. Smith, Brady said that when he was playing, he always took his receivers’ safety into consideration.
“Offensive players need to protect themselves. It’s not up to the defensive player to protect the offensive player,”Β Brady said in November. “The defensive player needs to protect himself. I didn’t throw the ball to certain areas because I was afraid players were going to get knocked out. That’s the reality. I didn’t throw it to the middle when I played Ray Lewis, because he’d knock [the receiver] out of the game, and I couldn’t afford to lose a good player.”
For his part, Minshew did actually accept his piece of the blame for the hit that led to the injury for Pittman.
“Yeah, it’s never ideal. You don’t want that. I don’t think there’s any malicious intent or anything. I think that’s sometimes how the game goes,” Minshew said. “I wish I wouldn’t have put Pitt in that position, honestly. So you always try to do your best to protect your guys, but there’s sometimes where unfortunately things just happen in the game.”
Brady’s actually been pushing that thought when he was still playing, bemoaning the penalization of defensive players back in 2021.
“A quarterback should only throw the ball to certain places, because your receiver is in danger of getting hit,” Brady said back in 2021. “When I used to play against Ray Lewis, I wouldn’t throw the ball to the middle of the field, because he would — he’d go after you. And we didn’t always have the biggest receivers. But he would hit them and knock them out of the game. And now, every hard hit is a penalty on the defense. So I feel like they penalize defensive players for offensive mistakes. … They’ve almost moved the protection of your opponent to you, as opposed to where it should be, which is on yourself. Like if you’re a quarterback, you’ve gotta protect yourself and your players. It shouldn’t be the responsibility of your opponent to protect you. And I think that’s a real — it creates really bad habits for players, because you feel like I can basically do anything. I could run and not slide, I could throw my receiver into any coverage and not have any repercussion for it. The one thing they’re gonna do is they’re actually gonna blame the defensive player for making a good, solid hit.”
Brady concluded that 2021 point with the same message he delivered just last month: “In the end, I think it’s really a disservice to the sport, because the sport isn’t being played at a high level like I believe that it once was. It actually deteriorates because you’re not teaching the players the reasons and the fundamentals of what the sport should be.”
It’s a message Brady has believed for a while, so it’s not entirely surprising to see him continue to push it forward — even if he felt like doing so by way of Instagram comment.
