Tom Brady faced scathing backlash from Shannon Sharpe over his defense of Houston Texans star Azeez Al-Shaair.
Al-Shaair sparked fury last weekend after flying into Lawrence with his elbow first when the Jacksonville Jaguars quarterback had already slid to the ground to give up the play.
Lawrence was left motionless on the floor while all hell broke loose on the field, with both teams involved in a bench-clearing melee as Jaguars players and staff lost their cool over the hit.
However, Brady surprisingly defended the Texans defender, suggesting that the onus should not have been on him to prioritize Lawrence’s safety after his late slide, instead claiming that the quarterback risked being hurt when he ran with the football.
But Sharpe furiously slammed the former quarterback for his take, suggesting Brady was being hypocritical.
‘Tom Brady is the wrong messenger because they had a rule changed,’ Sharpe said on his ‘Nightcap’ show with Chad ‘Ochocinco’ Johnson.
‘Does he not know ‘The Brady Rule’ was instituted to protect him? I get it; I get what he’s saying, Ocho, but he’s the wrong messenger. Because a lot of these rules that they put in place to protect the quarterback, he benefitted from.
‘It’s kind of like what we see with a lot of Hispanics when they talk about ‘Yeah, deport, deport, deport.’ When they got over here, we see it. We know how they got over here. See, it’s easy to say ex post facto. ‘Well, I’m here now. I don’t give a damn. Close it — don’t let nobody else over.’ Tom Brady said, ‘Well, hell, I ain’t got to take no more hits; punish the quarterback.’ Really, bro? Really? Really?’
In the wake of his late tackle and the brawl that followed, Al-Shaair has been hit with a three-game suspension by the NFL , who criticized his ‘lack of sportsmanship and respect for the game of football’ in a strongly-worded statement when issuing his ban on Tuesday.
The league chose to uphold the suspension during Al-Shaair’s remote appeal hearing on Wednesday.
‘The only aspect that I think is very challenging, and certainly for Trevor Lawrence, nobody wants to see anybody get hurt but it is also the reality of a very physical sport that we play,’ Brady had said on The Herd with Colin Cowherd earlier this week.
‘Defensive players have to be aggressive. That’s their nature. I was trying to be aggressive on offense, we tried to block aggressively, and at the same time the defense tries to tackle aggressively.
‘I don’t know, there’s an aspect to me that I think the quarterbacks need to take better care of themselves. I see Josh Allen run it a lot, I see Lamar Jackson run it a lot – and it’s a great skillset to have. A lot of times I wish I had that skillset.
‘At the same time, when you run you put yourself in a lot of danger. And when you do that I don’t think the onus of protecting an offensive quarterback who’s running should be on a defensive player. I don’t think that’s really fair to the defense.’
Brady also pointed to the timing of Lawrence’s slide before Al-Shaair came in with the tackle, suggesting quarterbacks should also be penalized for producing them too late in an effort to protect them going forward.
‘There’s more designed runs for quarterbacks ever now than in the history of the NFL,’ he added. ‘So are we really trying to protect quarterbacks? Because if you are trying to through the rules, then why are the offensive coordinators not protecting their quarterbacks by keeping them out of the pocket and not designing as many quarterback runs?
‘I think it’s gone to a point where everyone will label a certain player as a dirty player, I don’t like that one bit.
‘Maybe they [should] fine or penalize a quarterback for sliding late and say, “If we don’t want these hits to take place, we’ve got to penalize the offense and the defense rather than just penalize a defensive player for every single play that happens when there’s a hit on a quarterback.”‘
