Bill Belichick disagrees with NFL change as he uses Tom Brady example

Bill Belichick disagrees with the current NFL coaching decisions to rest starters in the preseason and insisted Tom Brady “always wanted to play”.

Starters taking reps during preseason has become a thing of the past, with quarterbacks from Bryce Young to Patrick Mahomes being rested. While other quarterbacks will be sitting this week out, others will take to the field fighting for their place on active rosters.

Ultimately, times have changed. Appearing on “The Pat McAfee Show”, Belichick explained the differences between preseason from earlier in his coaching career compared to the current day.

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“It really just depends on your team,” Belichick began. “You know, if you’re going to put your starting quarterback out there, you probably want to put them out there with your starting offensive line, the receivers he’s going to be throwing to, so if your depth is not good at those positions at that particular point in time - maybe you got a couple guys banged up or whatever - then is it really worth it?

“On top of that, you have to spend time preparing for your opponent, right? You don’t know what they’re going to do so I don’t think you want to play your starters for five plays. That doesn’t really do any good. You want to maybe leave them out there for 20, 25 players, something like that.

“Well, that involves preparation time. That’s maybe two or three days of practice, and I’d say with the shortened training camp timeframe now, that’s a little harder to do than it was in the past. I remember when I was with the Giants and you had three and a half weeks of training camp - you could take three days to prepare for your first preseason game and play you guys 20 plays a game or so and let them get into it.

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“Well, now it’s hard to get those days. When you go with joint practices, you can go ahead and put your best players out there and let them compete against the other team and really get a lot of reps and get a lot of quality work. Then, do you really want to come back and play those guys two days later basically on no rest, and put them in a big contract situation? Can you get more out of the joint practices?

“Some of it, especially at the quarterback position, I think depends a little bit on the player like Tom [Brady]. Tom always wanted to play in preseason. He had always felt like, ‘I want to get more work. I want to get the live speed of the game. I want to do that.’

“Then I’ve been with other players that don’t want to do that as much…. I don’t think there’s a right or wrong on that but I do think that especially with the quarterback position you would take that into consideration. If the player really wanted to play and felt like he needed for his timing then I think you’d probably find a way to do it, but as far as the rookies go, I think for those guys they should play and get a feel for the game."

He added: “The rookie quarterbacks this year, some of whom are a little undersized, just the height and the girth of the defensive lineman and all that, that’s good for him to experience in a live game situation but from the team standpoint you want to make sure you can protect those guys.”