Brady: ‘You gotta make mistakes'

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FOXBORO - Earlier on Wednesday, we spoke to Bill Belichick about Ryan Mallett's missteps in practice this summer.

Belichick went into solid detail about the need to make those mistakes on the practice field.

Tom Brady amplified that Wednesday afternoon.

"To be a good player you gotta make mistakes," he insisted. "And if you're not in the situation to make mistakes, then when you do get the opportunity you're gonna make 'em. So hopefully you get the opportunity in practice, rather than in front of 70,000 people. So when you drop back and evaluate the coverage and you make a read or you make a throw and it gets tipped and intercepted, hopefully you go into that week's game and see the same look and say, 'Nope, not throwing it.' Or you get the same look and you rip it because you have confidence you can do it."

Brady's ascent to superstardom has been well documented. Lost in the narration though, is the fact that Brady went through a significant rough patch in 2002.

Over a three-game stretch, Brady threw seven picks and the Patriots lost each game. He threw just five interceptions over the final nine games.

Even though he'd won a Super Bowl earlier that year, he was still in the learning stage of what he could and could not get away with.

"It's about being being in the situation in practice with a lot of pressure because Belichick puts a lot of pressure on, and you go out there and try not to make the same mistake twice. You can make them once, but he gets pissed when you make' em twice."

Hearing Brady unleash an obscenity after a practice pick is a rite of late summer. But he does point out that they are inevitable.

"You dont want to come out here and throw a bunch of interceptions, but at the same time its not a game so you want to install things and see how they work and try to give guys an opportunity to go out and catch the ball and make plays on the ball," he said. "So you probably do some things this time of year that you wouldn't normally do, but at the same time you're trying to make good decisions, read the coverage, and give the ball to the right guy."

He again emphasized the learning aspect.

"You gotta make the mistakes to learn from them," he explained. "And you never know how tight a window is until you throw it and it was too tight. So you try to force the ball into certain areas and then you learn from it and you say 'I can't do that.' You install new plays and you try to run them over and over and you try to identify all the problems where they come up and really make good decisions."

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