Brady may not have ever played in the NFL if he went to another team. Remember his rookie season, he couldn't even beat out Michael Bishop in the depth chart. Belichick just saw enough in him to carry four QBs.
Brady clearly wasn't ready to play, never mind start, back in 2000. He wasn't even good enough to dress. A lot of teams might have given up on him and there is a chance no one else would have picked him up or they might have picked him up and buried him on the practice squad.
Belichick did cultivate Brady. Weis slowly rolled out the offense to make him feel comfortable and build his confidence in his position. I am sure that was under the direction of Belichick. The fact that Belichick did have the team be defensive focused and not putting pressure on Brady to win the games week in and week out probably benefitted him early in his career.
Please...I really want to understand what you mean by
“Belichick did cultivate Brady.“ Can you be specific?
Did Mike McCarthy cultivate Rodgers? Did Any Reid cultivate Mahomes? Has Belichick cultivated Stidham? Kevin O’Connell? How about the brilliant offensive minded Kliff Kingsbury? Bledsoe sure had a lot of physical talent...no cultivation? Brian Hoyer sure looked like a moron in KC this year...hasn’t he been listening to the coach too?
See, this is the thing...you can only make your arguments by vague statements with no basis in reality. That’s always been the problem with the “magic dust” narrative about Belichick and Brady. Is there a single documented, specific event, fact, or story you can cite that explains how Belichick “cultivated” Brady in the sense that Brady was in any way different from any NFL player who has ever been drafted? (No). You would never say that another quarterback was “cultivated” by his coach; you would never say Belichick “cultivated” Lawrence Taylor.
“Weis slowly rolled out the offense to make him feel comfortable and build his confidence in his position. I am sure that was under the direction of Belichick.”
Where is your source for this? Can you cite anyone with direct knowledge? Virtually everything I’ve read is clear that Brady did a lot of his own film study and ran his own extra practice sessions with backups. There is zero evidence that the Patriots treated Brady any differently than any quarterback on any other football team, though you seem to think rather bizarrely that Brady might not have made it in the NFL with another team, despite that the Patriots provided the same basic coaching and guidance to Brady as all their QBs, similar to what most any team would. There was no special program, special system, special secret lessons, special training plan.
The fact that Belichick did have the team be defensive focused and not putting pressure on Brady to win the games week in and week out probably benefitted him early in his career.
Oh yes...a team that had lost 13 of its 18 games under Belichick, ranked dead last, 32 of 32 in teams most likely to win a SB in the 2000s, according to that Sporting News article in 2001 we all used to cite. The 2001 defense wasn’t elite. Throwing a young quarterback into an objectively horrible offense with virtually no playmakers.
Let’s give Belichick credit for drafting Brady (even though he, like anyone, did know what he was getting, he used the pick wisely), carrying him on the roster year one, promoting him to backup, and then sticking with him over Bledsoe, which was both wise and very ballsy. Those are things a coach does. A coach doesn’t make players or transmute skills to them. We don’t need to deify Belichick and make unproven claims to appreciate him and appreciate what he did to support Brady.
