Here’s the transcript for anyone who doesn’t have time to listen to it.
This revealed what made Brady so special.
BB: “I think it kind of started his senior year when Tom would start every game and Michigan do pretty good, and then [Drew] Henson would come in and things usually didn’t go so good. And then they’d bring Tom back at the end and they won most of their games. And then he had a great Orange Bowl game against Alabama. Just based on the opportunity that he had and the way he played well in big games at big moments and kind of, you could see the upswing, the potential, that he had, that’s kind of where he started. And then, his rookie year, you know, Tom didn’t play much, three snaps or whatever it was, but he took leadership over that rookie class and we had like 22 rookies and first-year players that year and he would keep them out after practice. They’d run plays, he knew what everybody was supposed to do. So if somebody made a mistake on the play – it wasn’t run by the coaches, it was run by Tom – and you could see the leadership that he captured with the team just in those sessions among his peers, which at that time were rookies and first-year players.”
“And then, after the first season, I brought in Damon Huard because I felt like I wanted to have an experienced backup quarterback and Tom beat him out in preseason. So Tom was the backup quarterback. And then when Drew got hurt, then it was really pretty much history
until the St. Louis game, the Rams game, and that was the game where prior to that week, I split reps between Tom and Drew, but Tom played the whole game and I just felt like after the game, that I just couldn’t do that. I had to give the starting quarterback the majority of the reps, and that it would just be hard to play well with only getting half the snaps. So at that point, I made Tom the starting quarterback. That’s the smartest decision I ever made, maybe other than drafting him.”
“And then it just got better from there. Tom talks about how much I taught him in those meetings but I learned so much from Tom because I never played quarterback, and I never saw the game through the quarterback’s eyes. I saw it through a coach’s eyes. And when Tom would tell me what he saw and how he saw it, it was incredible. During the game, he’d come off and I’d say, ‘What happened on that play?’ and he’d go through eight things that happened. ‘Tackle flashed in front of me, this guy slipped, I saw the linebacker drop wide, safety was a little deeper than I thought he’d be, and then this guy stepped in front, I kind of put it a little bit behind him because I saw this other guy closing.'”
“And then you go back and look at the film, and every one of those things happened in the exact sequence that he explained it to you on the field coming off. I’m like, ‘this guy sees everything. He sees the rush, he sees the coverage, he sees the routes, he sees the depths, and he sees a lot of things presnap. And when we had the meetings that Tom referred to, we would go over fundamentals, we’d go over game plans, we’d go over situational football, watch other teams play through situations, and I remember so many situations that came up in games where Tom would refer back to, ‘Yeah, that’s what we talked about a few weeks ago when we watched the Detroit/Atlanta game’ or ‘Yeah, remember when they ran this play in this situation two years ago?’ I mean, the memory and the capacity that Tom had to remember play situations and finer points like hard counts and getting out-of-bounds plays and things like that from years before in the exact same situation and timeframe was remarkable.”
“You know, we all have decent memories, but to be able to process it that quickly in a matter of literally seconds and split seconds on the field or during a timeout or going back on the field with however much time is left … ‘Yeah, this is what we talked about. This is that situation we had in training camp. We had 0:39 and the ball was at midfield.’ … So those are the things that I learned from Tom as a quarterback was how to see the game as a quarterback instead of as a coach. Tom would say, ‘You know, I can’t see that, I’m not really looking at that.’ Like, O.K., well I’m going to stop coaching that then. Because if you can’t see it, nobody else is going to see it, so let’s see how you see the game and let me learn from you. And Tom was great about that. We had a really good relationship, especially in the film room and talking football and all that, that I’ll always treasure, and I learned so much from. Because nobody sees the game better than Tom Brady sees it or saw it and I was so lucky to learn from him and his vision, no other coach will get that experience because it was, I mean, it was incredible.”
