Tom Brady has given new insight as to why he and Bill Belichick needed to separate when the two were members of the New England Patriots.
Brady and Belichick are undoubtedly the most successful player-coach duo in NFL history, with the Patriots sustaining a decades-long dynasty that culminated in six championships. However, Brady elected to sign with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 2020, ending his 20-year run with the Patriots.
Five years after his signing on March 20, the former star quarterback shared more insight as to why he and Belichick parted ways. In particular, Brady believed that working with Belichick brought about moments that were just too big to overcome between the two men.
"The reality was, after twenty years together, a natural tension had developed between where Coach Belichick and I were headed in our careers, and where the Patriots were moving as a franchise," Brady wrote in his weekly newsletter "The 199.' "It was the kind of tension that could only be resolved by some kind of split or one of us reassessing our priorities."
Brady then went on to say why he ultimately decided to sign with the Buccaneers for the final chapter of his career. Specifically, he compared how his situation with Tampa Bay would be in comparison to what his experience would be like, had he stayed in New England.
"I asked myself, as someone headed into their forties with school-age kids and twenty years worth of battle scars, what truly mattered to me now?" he continued. "What I ended up with was a list of about twenty things that I then ranked and graded on a weighted scale from 1 to 3.
"In the end, I chose Tampa, almost exactly five years ago now, because, in the aggregate, it graded out higher than New England along those twenty or so dimensions. It’s not much more complicated than that."
It was also reported by ESPN's Seth Wickersham at that time that Brady had grown frustrated by how the organization prioritized its finances and how the star fit into the team's plans. “Brady was tired of taking team-friendly deals with no input into how the money saved was spent — and still wanted a long-term contractual commitment,” Wickersham wrote in his book 'It's Better to be Feared.'
