Ten years of college strength coaching and I saw some odd stuff but this was 90-2000 and the functional stuff hadn't hit yet. Lots of college coaches I talked to did the basics for the most part with the few HIT/Hammer/Nautilus schools in the mix but things were simpler then. Fast forward to High School strength coaching in Texas 2000-2017 and I've lost count of this type of silly bullshit I've seen or heard about BUT I'll say the kids worked pretty hard but this crazy stuff is EVERYWHERE now!
WHAT SHOCKED me was my involvement with the NY Giants in the mid 90's when Reeves was coaching and they used my wtroom and our facilities at UAlbany NY for summer preseason camp. I thought "this is going to be great, guys fighting for rooster spots and busting their asses in everything they did"... After the first week in the weightroom I quit watching as I saw players giving half ass effort, others just sitting on a bench and saying out loud "I ain't doing nothing" and the kickers coming in after, putting a 45 on each side of the bar for bench and never doing it while they sat and talked about where the best bars where in Albany..
One of the players sweared by magnetic insoles in his shoes and how they kept him "balanced" and another told me "I don't do all this stuff I just bench". The asst strength coach at the time interviewed with the Jets and the Rams after the season and called me about my interest in being a second asst with him if he got hired. I told him I was interested but thought how can I put up with this shit??
At the same time we had a kid removed from our D3 program for skipping workouts and filling in his work sheet to lie and say he did the workouts.
I remember Reeves got fired and Jim Fassel replaced him. The next year the new staff came up with a HIT guy who said squats and cleans really didn't do anything and "he had a family to feed so it was too dangerous to even try". I got in the elevator at the athletic building one day and it was me and Fassel. I jokingly said " let me know when your ready to get those guys strong I have ten squat racks and ten platforms free mid afternoon". Fassel said "coach I appreciate that but our team doctors told us those lifts were really bad on the knees". I wished him good luck and we never spoke again... Oh well.
This isn't new and it'll never go away at that level.
Part of this is that his methods are, as far as I can see, pretty ill-defined. The original post, quoting the article summed it up pretty well with, "Instead, we should do less weight training or conditioning and more of… something else." When you're as vague about it as Brady seems to be, there is basically a lot of room to dance around, rationalize, and obfuscate.
I am sure with specific examples of specific training techniques or philosophies, you could get a lot of people right here to discuss/refute them in some level of detail.