Tom Brady has received plenty of criticism in his first year as a Fox NFL broadcaster, in part because he’s hesitant to critique poor quarterback play. But on Tuesday, that was not an issue at all for Brady who went after Ohio State quarterback Will Howard.
Brady, a Michigan Wolverine before he went on to win seven Super Bowls in the NFL, was quite overjoyed about his alma mater’s victory.
However, regarding Ohio State’s performance on Saturday, Brady didn’t mince words about the Buckeyes’ quarterback struggles during an appearance on The Herd with Colin Cowherd, arguing that it didn’t matter who was playing wide receiver for the program since Howard couldn’t get them the ball.
“Michigan is a very tough, hard-nosed team,” said Brady. They run the ball very well. They haven’t been great throwing the ball. But if I look at Ohio State, they have a great 7-on-7 team. They’ve got guys they can throw the ball too. But in the second half, they don’t even target their best players. So to me, it’s like, I may as well have been out there playing receiver for Ohio State. I can’t run, I couldn’t catch but it doesn’t matter if you don’t throw me the ball just like they didn’t throw a lot of their best players the ball in the second half.”
Brady didn’t place all of the blame on Howard though. He went on a detailed discussion about how Ohio State’s coaching staff didn’t create an environment for their best players to succeed, something that his former head coach Bill Belichick always made an effort to do with the New England Patriots.
“Whenever we got to big games, let’s say the Super Bowl, there are 70 plays left in our season. The entire 6-7 months of work is gonna come down to 70 plays. What do we want those 70 plays to look like? And then you reverse engineer it and you say we’re gonna want 40 passes and 30 runs. What 40 passes do we want? We could design 150 of them if you want. Now, there are 110 of those that won’t get called. So why don’t we just dial it back to only the specific ones where our best players are going to touch the ball doing the best things that they do? We’re gonna go out like that and if we lose, we lose. If we win, great, but we’re not gonna lose doing things that we don’t do well,” added Brady.
“I may as well been out there playing receiver for Ohio State. I can’t run, I couldn’t catch but it doesn’t matter if you don’t throw me the ball just like they didn’t throw a lot of their best players the ball in the second half.”
— @TomBrady pic.twitter.com/cv055htCqG
— Herd w/Colin Cowherd (@TheHerd) December 3, 2024
It’s hard to argue with anything Brady said here. In fact, it would be nice to hear Brady make these kinds of insightful anecdotes from the Fox broadcast booth more often.
Anyone who has heard Brady talk about football knows that he has as much knowledge about the game as anybody. Whether he has done a good job of relaying that information to viewers at home from the Fox broadcast booth is another story, which is something he’s even admitted.
Perhaps that skill will come with time for Brady. But for now, perhaps more appearances on The Herd throughout the remainder of the NFL season (which haven’t been as frequent as Cowherd suggested they would be) would do some good for his on-air presence.
