Joe Thomas Quotes

You have to be able to process 1,000 things that are happening at one time and be able to decide the right technique to use. And have the reaction between what your eyes are seeing and what your hands and feet need to do.

Behavior is individual and projecting an individual behavior upon an entire race is a version of racism. Put yourself in someone else‘s shoes: imagine what it would be like going thru life having this type of projection on you.

The last person to teach me how to act was my A-level Theatre Studies teacher at school, which I literally still draw on. Got an A!

If I was a stone mason or if I was a painter or building bridges or whatever, there’s going to be some wear and tear on your body and your brain. And that’s just the way it is.

I was more eager to lose weight than almost anything in retirement.

I’m hired to do a job. They expect me to do a job, and that job requires me to get my butt up and get back to the huddle, get the play and go do it another time. And until I can’t physically get up, I’m going to do that.

The passion, toughness and determination that you display on a daily basis is an inspiration for myself and for all of my teammates and all the people that wear ‘Cleveland‘ across their chest.

David Bakhtiari is a guy I like to watch. He’s an exceptional left tackle.

It’s just a matter of sometimes the CTE in your brain affects what happens in your life… and sometimes… it does not.

My mentality from the day I started playing sports was that you get up, you dust yourself off and you do it again.

So while most people dealt with the scale every Monday at the Berea training facility nervous about how high the number was going to be, I was the one that was nervous about how low the number was going to be.

Coming in, you’re so concerned about learning your job and the things you need to do to be successful individually. Once that’s good, you can start to focus on learning guys around you and learning defenses and what they’re trying to do to you.

You just don’t eat until you feel like you’re gonna throw up at every meal and all of a sudden the weight falls right off.

But I do hope that medicine continues to improve and, in 10 years maybe, they’ll be able to fix my body better than they did for the poor guys who are crippled up from playing in the NFL in the ’60s and the ’70s.

I’m not a huge offensive lineman.

I didn’t want to miss that opportunity to be able to enjoy an afternoon fishing with my dad which is something we had done growing up a ton of times on Lake Michigan and it was funny that it kind of turned into an attention thing than I expected and even more than if I would have gone to the draft.

It’s important to try and balance my own diet, my own health, my own lifestyle, with the needs of my family.

Growing up in a predominantly white area of the predominantly white state of Wisconsin, it was, I’m sad to say, relatively easy for me to go through life without recognizing or reckoning with the obvious signs of racism.

When I was drafted in Cleveland, I wanted to turn this team back into a perennial playoff contender and to win the Super Bowl.

If you look historically at the draft at quarterbacks in the top 10, about half of them flame out very quickly.

I honestly thought that since I didn’t associate myself with any people or groups who were outwardly racist, and I didn’t act in a way that struck me as racist, that this meant that I myself was not a racist, and that racism wasn’t a huge issue.

If it’s an outside zone play, you have the green light to cut-block.

No, but I remember going out to Las Vegas while playing AAU for a team from Wisconsin. I’d heard about this LeBron James guy. We went to the gym to watch his team, and I was very impressed at how big and athletic he was even at that age.

Your run blocking looks pretty similar to what the pass blocking looks like when you’re going with the play-action pass. So you really do have an opportunity to get really good at it quickly.

I think offensive linemen generally took the weight room and the workouts much more seriously, because we saw that it was a vital part of our training. We needed to be big and strong, and our muscles needed to be in good shape to handle the beatings.

Who cares if they throw a football that has no air pressure? What does it matter? Why don’t we let the quarterbacks do whatever they want to the football? I don’t understand why there’s any rules.

I’m a Clevelander. I’ve spent the majority of my adult life here. Every day when I come to work, it’s ‘Let’s turn this team into a consistent winner.’ Because it would be such a special story.

Maybe down the line I think I would like to call a game, but right now, I recognize where my talents are and how much work and growth I would have to have in order to be able to step into that booth.

I’d like to play as long as I still love the game, as long as I’m still feeling healthy and playing well so a team would want me to play for them.

I live in a flat in central London. I do like it there; there’s always stuff going on. But I do crave a bit of peace and quiet.

I’m not sure I really want to step into the booth.

I want to learn more about the game as a whole and about the finer points of technique across the line of scrimmage. I want to learn more about coverages and blitzes so I can kind of see the game before it happens.

We cannot just be nonracist. We really do need to be antiracist.

Goodbye not because I’m retiring, but because I’m merely changing jobs. From being your left tackle to being the No. 1 fan of the Cleveland Browns.

Until they study the general population and find out what the likelihood of CTE in a soccer mom is versus an NFL brain, we really have no baseline to rate this study off of.

The idea of going to New York for five days and kinda being paraded around by the NFL as they make money off your every step, and the whole purpose is just for publicity for me to stand there in a suit and go, ‘Look at me everybody!’… That sounds horrible.

But the way I look at it is just about every profession in our society: There’s some lasting effects. It’s just the way that our society is set up. People have to work.

You look at guys with significant Alzheimer‘s and dementia and the mood swings and the suicides that unfortunately NFL players have been faced with. And depression. Lou Gehrig’s disease. These are all things that have kind of been linked to the brain damage from football.

Playing in front of the greatest fans in the NFL is easily the greatest honor that I’ve had in my 11-year career. I hope I was able to make you guys proud in the way that I was always proud when I told people boldly that ‘I am a Cleveland Brown.’

When the game gets eyeballs in newspapers and on TV, that’s what in the end is the goal for everyone.