Russell Wilson and Daniel Jones are the most productive quarterbacks in the first two weeks of the 2025 regular season, and it’s breaking people’s brains. While performance spikes or slides are often attributed to the quarterback in question, one of the game’s greatest signal callers cited this aberration in the league’s QB hierarchy to question the quality of coaches.
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Tom Brady recently made headlines by suggesting that people need to stop making the mistake of “assuming that everyone knows how to develop a quarterback. There’s a lot of people that have no idea what they are doing when they are tasked with coaching a quarterback or calling an offense.”
And the New England Patriots legend is not the only former great and retired QB who is preaching this. During the most recent episode of his 4th & 1 podcast, the 2015 regular season MVP Cam Newton proclaimed that “resume fillers” have become all too prominent. According to Newton, that’s only going to hinder the overall product as time goes on.
“Coaches, nowadays, are benefiting more from player success more so than players benefitting from the development of good coaching… Just because you’re a great position coach does not mean that you’re a great unit coach, meaning coordinator,” said Newton.
“May I coach Josh Allen? May I coach Lamar Jackson?… That’s why I believe I’m a valid option for an offensive coordinator. And just because you’re a great unit coach, or a great coordinator, does not necessarily mean that you’re going to be a great head coach,” he added.
An example of this is Liam Coen, the new head coach of the Jacksonville Jaguars. A descendant of the Sean McVay coaching tree, Coen was a hotshot offensive coordinator who managed to help revitalize the career of Baker Mayfield in Tampa Bay.
After he was able to help the Buccaneers produce a top-five scoring season in 2024, he was immediately fielding head coaching offers. Coen became a head coach after just a handful of years as a play caller, making him one of the least experienced HCs in recent memory.
In the eyes of Newton, however, becoming a head coach in record time, while impressive, suggests that you’re better at politicking than you are at development.
“Coaches ain’t developing players in the league because they don’t have to. When we draft you, we [are] not gonna teach you how to catch. We [are] not gonna teach you how to throw… You should already be equipped with these things. We just need to teach you our system,” said the Carolina Panthers legend.
The way things are currently in the NFL, ‘tempo’ is being favored over ‘teachings.’ So long as that is the case, franchises will continue to find themselves releasing quarterbacks who couldn’t produce, only to then see them produce for another team down the line, just like the former New York Giant, Daniel Jones.
