"There Is Nothing Wrong With Being A Game Manager, It's A Great Thing!" - Bill Belichick

you talked about uh crisis time being like hey we got a or get off the pot here or this thing's gonna go first to last there's some players that have a get off the pot type career situation happening right in front of our eyes dbot has a question for you yeah a lot of quarterbacks you mentioned you know the overall offensive production kind of being down but some places where the quarterback play was kind of on point Baker Mayfield and Tampa uh Sam Darnell in Minnesota they dialed some things up couple touchdowns some 4x1 foration stra made some plays and also Derek Carr in New Orleans what do those coordinators and offenses do to kind of get those quarterbacks going and uh putting up points and being efficient with the ball yeah well as you know uh dbut the biggest thing for the quarterback is decision-making right so when you snap the ball and and call the play and the players run their routes uh you don't always know what the defense is going to be in you have to figure out where the weak point of the defense is which guy to throw it to uh and sometimes uh even if that's where you want to go they have it taken away somehow or uh and then you have to make a decision with it and I think the big thing is uh you know anytime that things go bad oh things go bad right now Frieza this is to lose yardage you know yeah try not try not to lose yardage and then if you can make a play make a play but don't don't make a play make a bad play so you know that that's the one that always got me when the player said why is trying to make a play I was like well how about try to make a good one then like a bad play yeah like like the play that LE like the play that Levis had where he gets out of the pocket he flips the ball uh you know underhand backhand whatever it was and that's just you know even if you hit it what do you really have uh not much and then if you don't hit it then you know you lose the game so it's just there's no upside to that play there's only downside and you know it's just you know that's just terrible decision can we do some risk management please can we do can we do a little risk management please we're in the fourth quarter we have a lead right now we're giving it up we gave it up here and the other team has not scored okay it's been uh defensive a couple of those Steelers win without scoring a touchdown Denver was on a run there where they had two safeties two field goals and then something else and it goes back to your point I guess about the entire uh offensive production and quarterback production a lot of bad decisions it sounds like you think are are taking place right now for some places well no well look I mean one team wins and one team loses so you know they're key decisions on both sides but I I think when you look at a player like Brady you know the thing that Brady of of all the great plays that he made the thing that Brady didn't do was you know he didn't have very many plays like like Levis had yesterday where he just you know gives the game away or makes a bad decision for the team you know Tom always protected the team and and even if it wasn't a great play at least it wasn't a bad play which is one of the reasons why we had so many so few negative runs when Tom was the quarterback it wasn't that necessarily every run was a great run but if it was a bad run Tom wouldn't run it he'd find something else to do he'd throw a look pass out to the receiver or or change the play in some way way but it wasn't just you know run the ball and get Slaughter for a three yard loss uh I think he must have said I don't know how many times yesterday in the game in the Dallas Cleveland game you know Dallas keeps going backwards they keep losing too many yards well that's the truth you know the offense's job is to move the ball forward and when you're in second and long and third and long more than 10 yards I mean it's really impossible to to have any kind of success or any kind of consistency so just get the thing moving in the right direction and and Tom and I've talked a million times about you know if you complete this pass what what's the upside you gain one yard you gain two yards all right you guys's going to get tackled anyway like the play we just saw in Tennessee I mean what if he had completed that what's the upside two yards what's the downside lose the game you know like that's you just you just can't make those kind of decisions even if that ball been complete there's no upside to it and so you know Tom did a great job of you know risk management and you know cut his losses and so you know rather than the ball over all right you lose a couple yards and you get sacked but at least we can gain our field position back by punt it on third down coach I don't know if you know this because you've been in an NFL building in your own Silo seemingly the term game manager is like a slanderous term for a quarterback and it's like why like game manager is exactly what you want at quarterback is that do you agree with that or am I wrong in that thought yeah no 100% the idea is to win the game and if you have to win the game by you know you know putting the let the defense win this game then you put the defense in a good position and let them win it whether it's Payton Drew Brees uh Rogers momes uh Brady like those guys are all great quarterbacks but they won the reason why they won is because they figured out what they needed to do to win in that game and look sometimes you got to go out and score 48 points sometimes you just got to not turn the ball over and and you know give yourselves a chance to play good defense sometimes again Tom said this multiple times yesterday was great I I mean I felt like you know I was hearing an echo but they're in field goal range don't lose yardage you got three points and then something would happen to get a penalty or something and end up end up not being able to even get three points out of it so you know knowing where you are and and not getting not going backwards offensively when you're already in scoring range you have a good field goal kicker um th those are things like that I mean you could say they're little things but they're not little things it's not game management it's it's winning football yeah I don't know when it became but it was wild it just kind of like took over the Internet that guy's a game manager it's like no yeah that's part of being a quarterback need to manage it need that need that to happen in this entire thing go ahead AJ coach you mentioned Tom saying things and it felt like it was an echo like what does that feel like as a as a coach when you hear your your former players actually like you you think yeah these guys actually were listening to me all this time when they're when you hear them giving other people advice or coaching that you gave them it's almost like when you see your kids doing that when they you know sometimes my kids don't want to listen but then I see my oldest telling my youngest ones like things that I have said like okay they actually are hearing me like how does that feel as a coach yeah it's a great feeling isn't it no it's a great comparison AJ it's similar like that with you know when you hear that from your kids you hear that from another player but look I would say with Tom I learned a lot more from him than he learned from me I'm sure uh when we would sit in those meetings uh look I see the game from the sideline I see the game from film uh Tom would see the game from where he saw it from behind the center and in the pocket and you know he would say here's what I can see this is what's hard for me this is what you know this is why this is gives it away and things like that and he he taught me all the little things uh with some are big things of you know just how the game how he saw the game as a quarterback and uh you know what would happen in between plays he'd hear somebody on a defense say something and then he'd know uh that would give him a tip as to what they were doing or or you know if the guy was tired let's you know he'd call a play and go at him again or you know that type of thing and uh you know he could just tell sometimes by looking at guys eyes how how nervous they were trying to cover a certain receiver and he throw that guy those are little things that as a coach you just don't see but on the field you know you've seen it AJ you know there's things that you see on the field that a coach just can't pick up on film and um so look I learned a tremendous amount from Tom we had a great relationship and you know hopefully he learned some things for me too but um the amount that he taught me about playing quarterback and seeing the game through his eyes that Randy Moss taught me about being a receiver being a fast receiver because I'm not fast I don't know what it's like to be fast that what it's like to be fast and that you know that taught me a lot it was uh so yeah it was you know look the whole game managing thing the idea is to win and and if the quarterback's job is to help the team win and it's also his job is to help his players be productive right and gain yardage and so I used to tell Tom all the time and Tom knew it we could never gain any yards as long as he had the ball we would only gain yards as soon as he gave it to somebody else he's a thousand yards rusher remember no big deal he's a thousand yard rusher right that quarterback sneak he had every time every time the quarterback sneaks the quarterback sneaks not included because he was great at quarterback sneak but you know when he ran the ball we didn't gain any yards and until he threw it to somebody else we didn't gain any yards so the quicker the ball got out of his hands and the quicker he got it to somebody else the more yards we were going to gain the more points we were going to score and that's the way he played and that's you know not to the other team but get it to our guys and let them be productive with it um that's that's a good quarterbacks do greatest of all time you're a quarterback like Lamar Jackson or somebody like that yeah you can he can gain some yards like I get that he can gain some yards but Tom knew what he was and what he wasn't and Tom's job was to get the ball to everybody else and let them game the yards and nobody did it better we're excited to watch Tom grow through the season as commentators the internet was not kind to him Tom Brady that's going to happen he's used to it he's only going to work and get better