Cleveland Browns: What Bill Belichick did for Tom Brady that he didn’t for Bernie Kosar

What was different for Tom Brady

After Belichick was left behind when Art Modell took the Browns to Baltimore to become the Ravens, it took a few years before the Patriots came calling. When Tom Brady came along in 2000, like Kosar, he was hyper-intelligent with a strong, accurate arm and the ability to stay cool under fire. He led the Michigan Wolverines to a No. 5 ranking overall, plus he had beaten Ohio State and then Alabama in the Orange Bowl, though he didn’t put up enormous passing stats (30 TDs in his college career versus 17 INTs).

In contrast to Bernie Kosar, Brady learned to become one of the greatest of all time at getting tackled and falling down without getting seriously injured. That sounds ridiculous but it’s not.

Those of you who have studied martial arts such as judo, jiu-jitsu, and aikido know that it is absolutely an art form to falling and distributing the impact so that the athlete does not sprain an ankle or break a wrist or suffer some even worse injury.

When Brady is getting sacked, he knows how to immediately curl his body around the football to protect it, scrunches his shoulders, keeps his head down and he also keeps his arms and legs tucked in so that he doesn’t take on too much damage. He hardly ever takes on a tackler broadside.

The cardinal sin is for the quarterback to try to break his fall by sticking his elbow out to break his fall to the ground. It’s a natural instinct, but it is totally wrong, because the shock is transmitted to the shoulder, and the result can be a dislocated shoulder. Players who do that need to be sent to the local martial arts studio and be taught to take 1,000 falls — and that instinct must be drilled out of them. All players, but especially quarterbacks, need to keep the elbow tucked in when they go down.

It may be giving Belichick too much credit to say that he’s personally and directly responsible for coaching Brady’s form to minimize damage during a sack. After all, other Patriots quarterbacks, including Jimmy Garoppolo, Jacoby Brissett, Brian Hoyer, and Matt Cassell, were not as damage-resistant when given the chance to become starters, though they were all better off than Kosar.

But for whatever reason Brady, whether by good fortune or by design, was surrounded with unique coaches like Dick Rehbein, Tom Martinez, and Alex Guerrero in the early days. Rehbein might have been a true quarterback genius and worked with Brady on his mechanics including avoiding damage control. Tragically, Rehbein died from a heart attack in Brady’s rookie year, so his impact is difficult to measure.

Incidentally, there were quarterbacks with excellent survival skills who played back in the day before all the rule changes were put in place to protect quarterbacks. Probably the best was Fran “the Scram” Tarkenton. Unlike Brady, he was an elusive rollout passer who liked to scramble and buy time for his receivers to get open. Hence, he took many more hits than Brady at a time (1961-1978) when rules did not protect the quarterback as much as today.

Defensive coordinators hated Tarkenton and were always warning him that he was going to get killed, but he played till he was 38 and missed very few games. Like Brady, he was great at protecting both the ball and himself while going down in the grasp of a defender. He knew those survival techniques to protect himself as well as anyone. This fan is not aware that Tarkenton studied martial arts, but somehow, he acquired an amazing skill set, worthy of a Shaolin monk.