Let’s go back in our time machines and revisit the 2020 NFL offseason. The league agreed to a new collective bargaining agreement, paving the way for a 17-game regular season. A global pandemic forced Roger Goodell to host the NFL Draft from his basement. However, the real headline from that offseason was Tom Brady leaving the New England Patriots for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
After nine AFC Championships, six Super Bowl victories, 14 Pro Bowls, and 20 years building a dynasty, the greatest quarterback and coach in NFL history parted ways. It was a hotly debated topic: who was most responsible for the Patriots’ success, Brady or Bill Belichick? Fast forward six years, and it’s no longer a tough question to answer.
Belichick recently appeared on Fox News Media’s “Hang Out with Sean Hannity,” and revealed that his quarterback leaving New England in 2020 was the correct decision. Why? Because the Patriots were on a downward slope overall.
“Tom leaving was absolutely the right thing for him to do,” Belichick reported, via Boston.com. “We didn’t have a good team in 2020. We just didn’t have a good football team. We had all those guys that left — [Rob] Gronkowski and [Julian] Edelman. Most of our team was gone. [Devin] McCourty and a few others were still there, but they were about to go too. We were just at the end.
“And honestly, I was happy for him that things worked out well for him in Tampa, because he was with a team … and then he went on and won. That made me happy for him, because Tom — it wouldn’t have gone well in 2020 in New England. On this, I can guarantee that.”
Belichick reported the Patriots put “everything we had” into the 2019 season, which ended prematurely in the wild-card round.
With Brady gone, the Patriots signed former MVP quarterback Cam Newton to replace him. While Newton did punch in 12 touchdowns as a runner in 2020, he averaged just 177.1 passing yards per game as the Patriots took an expected step backward at 7-9. New England bounced back in 2021 thanks to rookie quarterback Mac Jones, who led the Patriots to a 10-7 record and playoff berth, but that would be the final winning season of the Belichick era. New England finished 8-9 in 2022, followed by a disastrous 4-13 campaign in 2023. That’s when Belichick and the Patriots “mutually agreed to part ways.”
Brady, on the other hand, easily won the divorce.
Despite being 43 years old and playing for his first team other than the Patriots in a season complicated by COVID-19, Brady took Tampa Bay to 11-5 while throwing for 4,633 yards, 40 touchdowns and 12 interceptions. The Bucs then won three straight playoff games on the road, including against the rival New Orleans Saints and Aaron Rodgers’ Green Bay Packers, before defeating Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl LV — which was played in the Bucs’ home stadium. In his first year away from New England, Brady won a Super Bowl and Super Bowl MVP.
Brady went 32-18 as the starter in Tampa over three seasons, and 5-2 in the playoffs, with his seventh career Super Bowl victory, before hanging up the cleats for good.
“I learned so much from Tom. I never played quarterback,” Belichick reported. “Tom saw the game through a quarterback’s eyes. I saw the games through a coach’s eyes. Together, I think we both learned a lot from each other. Tom, how defensive coaches looked at him or looked at offense. Me, on what a quarterback can do and what he can’t do, what’s hard, what’s easy, what I can see, what I can’t see, and how you see the game.
Despite what some football fans may believe, there appears to be no bad blood between Brady and Belichick. Maybe the quarterback was more important in sustaining the kind of historic winning the Patriots did in the 2000s, but there’s no doubt the quarterback and the coach will reside in Canton one day.
