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Considering the fact that, without fail, following every Tampa Bay Buccaneers loss this season Bruce Arians has sounded like he’s throwing Tom Brady under the bus, there has been much ado about whether or not the coach and the QB are at loggerheads and don’t have the greatest relationship.
Following the Bucs latest loss to the Kansas City Chiefs – a game in which Brady threw two more interceptions, giving him 11 in 12 games on the season – Arians was asked about repeatedly calling out the future Hall of Famer for his poor play.
“It’s not criticism, it’s honesty,” Arians told CBS reporter Tracy Wolfson.
During Sunday’s game, CBS analyst Tony Romo suggested that Brady’s failures were due in large part to the type of offense Arians wants to run
Tony Romo with some educational insights into the problems Tom Brady has with Bruce Arians offense – not enough pre-snap motion, no run game or play-action – none of the things that make it easier to play QB.
— Ed Werder (@WerderEdESPN) November 29, 2020
And while that may be true, many speculated that Romo was just saying what his friend Brady had told him at some point prior to the game.
https://twitter.com/WhitlockJason/status/1333197219755937794
Arians, when asked about Romo’s comments, didn’t really sound like he was all that interested in changing the offense for his quarterback.
Arians was asked about that today – he said some QBs don’t like a lot of motion, that they do some but not much right now. https://t.co/5alxBflPP2
— Greg Auman (@gregauman) November 30, 2020
Monday night, during his weekly appearance on Westwood One with Jim Gray, Brady claimed that despite the perceived friction between him and Arians during the Bucs 1-3 slide, his relationship with the coach is great.
“I’ve got a great relationship with B.A. (Arians), and we talk every day,” said Brady. “I’ve got a lot of respect for him and how he runs the team and so forth.”
Brady then added that all the bad relationship chatter has been nothing more than a media creation.
“Any time you lose games, a lot of people want to place blame, especially in the media, and they want to pit one player against another player, or a player against a coach and so forth,” said Brady. “That’s not been my style. … And I just think about it from a player’s standpoint. I always think about what I need to do better, and I certainly haven’t played to my level of expectation, and I’ve got to do a better job, and that’s what it comes down to for me.”
Also not helping Brady is the fact that the Buccaneers’ running game ranks 28th in the NFL with 277 runs vs. Brady’s 474 passes, even with the offseason additions of Leonard Fournette and Shady McCoy (who has run the ball less times than Blaine Gabbert and gained a grand total of minus-1 yard).
“We’ve put in a lot of work in over the last three or four months, and it’s a production-based business,” he said.
“So when you win, you get to deal with all the great questions and so forth, and when you lose, you’ve got to deal with the questions of why you’re losing and who’s to blame for losing and all that. But when you’re on the outside, that’s just what you deal with. When you’re on the inside, we don’t think like that.
“I don’t think I’ve ever thought, ‘Man, this is the problem.’ I think you try to critically evaluate how your performance is, how you think you can help the team in a more detailed way, and then you’ve got to go put it to work.”