John Friesz appeared a timely topic heading into this year’s Super Bowl, as six of his 11 seasons as an NFL quarterback were spent with the teams in Seattle and New England.
A record-setting local product (Idaho out of Coeur d’Alene High), he retired back to North Idaho, and now watches games mostly as a fan, rooting next week for the Seahawks, his favorite team growing up.
So, Friesz’s greatest value, for our purposes today, is as an NFL historian, providing a few perspectives only he can offer.
Friesz can offer first-hand testimony to what he considers a massive talent gap between the really good quarterbacks and those few true elites.
In his final two seasons in the league, with the Patriots, he was coached by the extremes of the coaching temperament spectrum – the effervescent, high-spirited Pete Carroll, and the dour, regimented Bill Belichick.
That the two of them could both reach such levels of success via such different paths surprised Friesz.
And, despite fashioning an impressive career, playing with four teams, starting 38 NFL games, throwing 45 touchdowns and nearly 9,000 career passing yards, his greatest contribution to NFL history might have been his duties in his final season in the league, 2000.
That season, he was asked to back up Pro Bowl quarterback Drew Bledsoe, surely an honor. But more interesting, the staff wanted him to mentor and counsel a somewhat scrawny sixth-round rookie out of Michigan.
Tom Brady.
Yes, Tom Brady, considered by many the greatest quarterback in NFL history, started off as John Friesz’s backup, learning the ropes from the veteran.
“Don’t forget that Brady was my backup,” Friesz said, with a joking insistence, in a phone interview.
Friesz was lightly recruited out of Coeur d’Alene, signed by Dennis Erickson, but coached by Keith Gilbertson. His arm was special. He was named Big Sky Conference MVP three times, winning the Walter Payton Award as the nation’s top Division I-AA player.
In 2006, he was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame.
So, when Friesz speaks humbly of his achievements and his career, that’s mostly just his nature, and it’s in comparison to the best of the best he came to see in the NFL.
The San Diego Chargers drafted him in the sixth round in 1990, and he earned the starting spot the next season. He started all 16 games. Friesz, though, lost the next year to a preseason knee injury.
It became a bit of a trend for Friesz.
A smart quarterback with a good arm, he was considered strictly a pocket passer. Not that he was less durable than others who sometimes play the position, it seemed that whenever he earned potential long-term chances, he would suffer an untimely injury that prevented him from ever anchoring his position.
“Shoot, I never thought I’d ever start at Idaho … so, to then hang on even for a little while (in the NFL) was a dream come true,” Friesz said. “But then to fool them for that long was extra special; I’m super thankful.”
It is at this point where Friesz takes a look back at his career.
“Honestly, not modestly, there’s such a difference at that position between just a player and a legit career starter, Hall-of-Fame type. Those guys are amazing, they make it look so easy, even to those of us who can do it at a pretty high level. … They’re just different.”
He started 11 games in four seasons in Seattle, the Hawks going 6-5 in his starts for Erickson.
Friesz was 32 when he ended up in New England backing up Bledsoe (a Washington State standout) in 1999 under Carroll. After an 8-8 season, Carroll gave way to Belichick.
“You could not find two more different coaches that those two,” Friesz said. “With both of them, what you see is what you get. Pete was so fun, laughed, playing catch, having a good time, but it wasn’t working at the end of his stay there.”
And Belichick?
“He was all business. If you got him one on one, you might get a little smile. But that was not the façade he wanted out there for the team.”
In 2000, his job description was made clear by offensive coordinator Charlie Weiss. “He said, ‘Your job is to back up Drew and be ready to go.’ ”
His other job that season: “Brady was going to follow me around and we would do it all together. I would teach him, not so much the X’s and O’s, but all the other parts of it, how to do it the right way.”
Looking back, Friesz didn’t think he saw much about his physical skills that would hint that Brady would play 23 years, let alone win seven Super Bowls.
What he saw from the start, though, was an attitude, and an unwillingness to allow losing to become part of the job.
“I saw early on, through him, that it didn’t have to be the way it was,” Friesz said, recalling a conversation on a bus ride after a loss to Cleveland. “He told me, ‘I don’t get it, why does it have to be like this? Why is it so flat and nobody cares?’ I said, ‘That’s the difference between college and pros; in college, everybody is doing it for their school and the fun and teammates. In the pros, it’s a business.’ ”
Brady rejected that approach.
“He never did that … never,” Friesz said. “I think that’s one of the major reasons he was successful and had a career over 20 years.”
Friesz recalled that he and Bledsoe would mildly haze the rookie Brady, as is common in the NFL. “But he fought back on it, not physically, but he said, ‘No, you’re not doing that to me, I’m doing this to you.’ We treated him really nicely, but he wasn’t going to take it.”
Friesz remembered Brady finding a lifesized “standy” likeness of Bledsoe advertising a soft drink. Brady brought it back to the headquarters’ inside practice facility and propped it up near the door. Bledsoe was the face of the franchise, and this rookie was going toe-to-toe with him with sarcastic jibes.
“What rookie does that?” Friesz asked.
Only Brady.
Friesz said he can’t recall when, but he saw Brady a while back, and the superstar thanked him for all the lessons he had passed on.
Even the ones he didn’t choose to listen to.