Martellus Bennett shares meaningful Brady/Belichick anecdote

Former Patriots tight end Martellus Bennett recently shared a story that perfectly illustrates why the Brady/Belichick relationship has been so successful.

Many New England Patriots fans were hoping that Martellus Bennett might be persuaded to come out of retirement and join the team in 2019. After all, his brother Michael Bennett just got traded to the team this offseason; and longtime tight end Rob Gronkowski announced in March that he was retiring from the NFL, leaving a gaping hole at the tight end position this fall.

Unfortunately, Bennett has made it abundantly clear that he has no plans to return to the team at this point, so it appears that ship has sailed.

Still, he’s not above providing some fascinating insights into the inner-workings of the franchise, especially now that he’s on the outside looking in as a civilian like the rest of us.

“A crazy thing I saw, one day we were at practice and the defense is crushing us. Like we can’t complete no passes. You know, sometimes they do the install and it’s just the right install,” Bennett said on FS1’s “First Things First.”

"“So we come into the meeting and Bill always has the bad plays of the day and he’s just like calling out Tom. You know, like, ‘We have quarterbacks that can’t make throws.’ I’m like, ‘This is Tom Brady. He can make all the throws.’ And I’ve never seen coaches really call out the quarterbacks in group meetings. So after that meeting, I go to finish my workout or whatever and Tom is in there doing drop-backs. He’s just throwing drop-backs. He’s pissed off. The next day we go 33-for-33 or something like that at practice and from then I was just like, ‘Oh, we’re gonna be great.’ I’ve never seen anyone that didn’t shut down. He was like, ‘All right, I’m gonna show you tomorrow.’ He just picked them apart.”"

Bennett’s anecdote illuminates just what has made the Tom Brady/Bill Belichick tandem so successful for the past two decades essentially. Even though Brady is almost universally viewed as the greatest quarterback of all time – and perhaps even the greatest football player of all time at this point – he’s still not immune to criticism.

And rather than taking umbrage at said criticism and “shut(ting) down” like Martellus Bennett suggested other star players might do, Brady used the public tongue-lashing as fuel to improve and practice his fundamentals.

“I try not to laugh sometimes because, like, the way he does it is funny to me,” Bennett said of Belichick’s tough-love coaching. “I find Bill to be hilarious. But he calls everybody out. That’s the first team I’ve been on where I felt everyone was equal.”

Indeed, that sense of all players on the team being equal – whether you’re an established superstar, a green-in-the-gills rookie, a perennial Pro Bowler, or a third-stringer struggling to stay on the roster – is what makes “The Patriot Way” such a successful philosophy up in Foxborough.