TRANSCRIPT: Bill Belichick’s Speech at Tom Brady’s Patriots Hall of Fame Induction
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Here’s what former New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick had to say during Tom Brady’s Patriots Hall of Fame induction ceremony Wednesday night.
[Roaring Appluause]
“Thank you. Yeah, thanks a lot. Thank you.”
[Roaring Appluause]
“Thank you. Love you, New England. Love you, Patriot fans. And love Tom Brady.”
[Roaring Appluause]
“Thank you, Patriot Nation. Thank you.”
[Roaring Appluause]
“Tom, it’s a lot better reception than we got out in LA. Thank you. Thanks so much. Thank you.”
“Thanks so much. That’s such a warm, warm welcome. I can’t tell you how much it means to me to come back here and see the great Patriot fans. Thank you.”
“I tell you, this is hard because for a couple hours, everybody, and rightfully so, everybody has said so many things about Tom, great things about him. It’s just being redundant to go on and on about all the greatness that he’s brought to all of us, all of us, fans, coaches, everybody has been involved with him. So I’ll try to just share a couple of personal stories and remarks here.”
“First of all, I’d say it was a tremendous honor and a privilege for me to draft Tom and to coach him for 20 years. As we’ve heard from so many of his teammates, his pursuit of excellence, his work ethic, the drive, the competitiveness, the unselfishness, everything he brought to the team, it was really an honor for me to be involved with that and to be able to work with him every day and learn from it. I know that we can talk about a lot of his great plays, and also we’d be up here all night. I mean, this thing we could go until the middle of next week. But just a handful of things, and the guys that just were up there, the 82-yard to Troy Brown in 2003 to beat Miami in overtime, right? The 59-yard countdown in the snow to Deion Branch down the sideline in Chicago. Right here on this field, five touchdown passes in the second quarter against Tennessee. Three to Randy, one on a flea flicker, and two to Wes in one quarter. The seam pass to Rob in Super Bowl 53 to set up the winning touchdown. We can go on. We can go on and on. But a couple of the plays that I think about that I remember where Tom was the most excited after the play would be the scramble in Chicago against Urlacher for the first down, the scramble for the touchdown in the Snow Bowl against the Raiders, where honest to God, when he spiked the ball, I was afraid he was going to separate his shoulder.”
“But I think maybe he was a little surprised at some of those plays, but those were awesome plays. To watch Tom run and pick up those key first downs and touchdowns and all that. I mean, he loved that. He really did. He loved that. But we talk about all Tom’s great plays and go on and on and on. But I’ll just say this. The thing about Tom that I think is so impressive, so unbelievably impressive, and what he did for us for 20 years, 19 years that he played for us, is he avoided bad plays. He avoided bad plays. And we have a saying, we have a couple of sayings here that I’ve used with the teams. You can’t win until you keep from losing or more games in the NFL are lost than are won. If you just don’t go out there and screw it up, you got a pretty good chance to win. With Tom, through his decision-making, preparation, the numbers are just historical in terms of fewest turnovers, fewest negative runs, fewest offensive penalties. When you eliminate all those plays and you can stay out a long yardage and you can keep the ball going forward and you can keep managing situations, and then that makes Tom’s excellence on third down and in the red area and long sustained drives because there were so very few bad plays, way, way less than any other team in the league, by far.”
“And of all the things that Tom does well, I think the ones that are the thing that’s underappreciated, not by the coaching staff, and certainly not by me, but sometimes people just don’t give him enough credit for how very few bad plays he had a quarterback as a team.
[Applause]
“Yeah, hell, yeah.”
“I mean, absolutely. For the quarterback who handles the ball literally on every single play, other than a direct snap to Kevin Faulk or James White, but he literally handles the ball on every play. So every play went through Tom, and there were just so few bad runs, sacks, penalties, turnovers that the team was never really put in very many bad positions. I think that’s one, of all Tom’s great qualities, that’s, one of the greatest, is he always protected the team, did the best thing for the team, and kept the team out of bad situations. And that really helps everybody else.”
“Now, the one bad decision that Tom did make that I personally saw was not on the football field, was on the golf course. Bill Perocchi, the CEO of Pebble Beach, invited me to play in the Pebble Beach Pro-Am. So, I played with Tom, so we’re in a foursome together. We’re on the sixth hole. The sixth hole is a long par 5, down a hill, up the hill. The Pacific Ocean is on the right. It’s a big cliff. It’s a typical Pebble Beach day, overcast, cloudy, light rain, mist. It’s not … typical. Tom, now, again, the pro-am, keep in mind, you have a pro. When you hit a bad shot, and I hit a lot of them, you just pick the ball up and play the pro’s ball. That’s what you got a pro for. You don’t worry about double bogeys, you don’t worry about triple bogeys, you don’t worry about lost balls. It’s the pros’ job to make a par.”
“So, Tom hits his drive, hits his second shot, and the ball is going over to the right, over to the cliff, which goes into the Pacific Ocean, and the ball rolls out of sight. And so it’s like, ‘Well, it looks like this one rolled into the ocean.’ And as we walk up there, you don’t see the ball. And we get to the edge and look over the cliff, and there’s the ball on a ledge over the cliff. And the cliff now is like 250 feet down to the Pacific Ocean, rocks, and the waves are smashing on the rocks. I look at Tom and I look at the ocean, and I’m thinking about our starting quarterback, and I’m thinking about our season. Tom’s got that determined, focused, laser-focused Tom Brady look. We all know what that is. He takes the club and walks down onto this ledge. He’s got one foot on the side, one foot on the grass. It’s 250 feet down to the rocks and pitches it up onto the fairway. I can see our whole season just in my eyes there at that moment. Then he needs the caddy to help him launch back up onto the fairway. I mean, he’s down there like three or four feet. I’m like, ‘Tom, did you think about maybe just take an unplayable eye on that one?’ But Tom made very few bad decisions on and off the field. He was a model for consistency, for dependability, and for always doing the right thing and was such a great example for all of us.”
“The opportunity I had to meet with Tom, at least twice a week, we met a little bit more than that earlier in his career, but twice a week, I met with Tom. Those were some of the best days I had as a coach in my entire career because I learned so much. I saw the game through his eyes, which, as we all can imagine, is phenomenal. He taught me so much about how he saw the game. I tried to teach him how I saw the game as a coach, but not as a quarterback. And he taught me how he saw the game as a quarterback, not as a coach. I mean, those were just some of the very best meetings, very best times, honestly, in my coaching career.”
[Applause]
“Yeah. Thank you.”
“And through those meetings and the preparation that we had, Tom had, the things that really stood out were how much he cared and how much he prepared. And several of the guys have talked about his preparation. It’s really legendary all week. And those meetings were very challenging for me because I knew he’d probably seen 10, maybe 15 games of the opponent that we were going to play. And I wanted to make sure that I was as well as he was, and that was honestly a high bar. But Tom, his caring and his preparation were just exceptional. I can’t really put into words how much he did and how extraordinary it was from Monday to Sunday after the game, watching film on the way back from the team that we played on away games, to Saturday night meetings, to Sunday morning meetings. I mean, his determination and relentless pursuit of excellence was just beyond anything that I’ve seen from any other player at that position.”
“I just want to take a second to mention the coaches that were most directly involved with Tom. So Ernie Adams for 20 years, Josh McDaniels, Charlie Weis, and the new head coach of the Boston College, Billy O’Brien. And those guys did such a great job of coaching and working with Tom, and particularly in seeing Tom develop and looking at his skills and trying to tailor the offense to all the things that he did well and did best and that he was most comfortable with. Those guys put in a lot of time and a lot of work to make that happen. When we practiced, and it was hard because the offense was good. There was a lot of good players. Talked about a lot of those, the receivers and all that. But the offensive line, which was run by Dante for the majority of that time, who’s also in the Patriots Hall of Fame, Dante is just like all the other offensive linemen. As long as they don’t call holding on him, he’s happy, man. But no, Dante and his guys took really good care of Tom, and the communication that was necessary between the quarterback and the offensive line to handle the different things that we saw on a weekly basis was just exemplary. The preparation that That Dante did with his guys and the way his guys protected Brady was exceptional.”
“Then that led to highly, highly competitive practices. When you think about the defensive players that worked against Tom, and I’m talking about the starters that were out there, and they took a lot of reps against our first-team offense and against Brady. Rodney Harrison, who deserves to be in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and I really hope he gets there. You know [Mike] Vrabel and [Tedy] Bruschi, [Richard] Seymour, [Lawyer] Milloy, Ty Law, [Aqib] Talib, [Willie] McGinest, [Vince] Wilfork. [Junior] Seau. Then more recently, like [Patrick] Chung, [Devin] McCourty, [Rob] Ninkovich. And last but not least, {Dont’a] Hightower. I’d say without Hightower, I don’t know how a couple of those Super Bowls would have turned out.”
“But I can tell you, as a coach who spent most of his career on defense, the number of times that I walked off the field with our other defensive coaches, and we looked at each other and we were kind of shaking our heads a little bit like, Are we that bad on defense? We cannot stop these guys. Are we that bad? And then you realize over time how good Tom and the offensive unit was and how competitive it was. We can argue back and forth about who got the better of who in practice, the offense or defense. But I can tell you, those practice squad players and some of the scout team players, they competed so hard to break up a pass from Tom Brady, to intercept a pass from Tom Brady, and it made everybody better. So I just want to just take a second to say that Tom’s competitiveness rubbed off. The defensive competitiveness made Tom better. Tom made the defense better. The scout team made the offense better. And the competitive practices that we had, and they’re always indelibly etched in my mind, is one of the big reasons why those six banners are flying up there.”
“In conclusion, I just, Tom, want to say thanks on behalf of all the players, all the coaches, all the staff, all the people, the hundreds of people that are here, and the thousands of fans that are here. Thank you. And thank you for all that you’ve done for us. Thank you for all you’ve done for me. And thank you for the example and model that you’ve been for all of us on a daily basis for 20 years.”
“You’re unbelievable. Congratulations.”
Video from the Team’s YouTube Account:
(Editor’s Note: This transcript is done via the available footage and is subject to typos. If you spot something, please take a moment to let me know in the comments below.)
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