FOXBORO, Mass. — Tom Brady won six Super Bowls with the New England Patriots, and on Monday, the legendary quarterback revealed what led to his shocking decision to leave the franchise after 20 seasons.
While his 2020 departure from Foxboro seemed unthinkable to the Patriots faithful, his choice to move on with his Hall-of-Fame career and join the Tampa Bay Buccaneers was actually inevitable.
Brady admitted in his weekly newsletter that he left the team after a “natural tension” developed with his longtime head coach, Bill Belichick.
In reflecting on NFL free agency and the one time he was involved with it, Brady said the tension with Belichick had been growing for years.
“For me, it was a creeping decision that lived passively in the back of my mind for 2-3 years until March of 2020 when a whirlwind of a few days made me realize that a decision was coming sooner rather than later,” Brady wrote. “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. It was the kind of tension that could only be resolved by some kind of split or one of us reassessing our priorities.”
Brady led the Buccanneers to a Super Bowl title in his first season with the team. He turned in two more strong seasons in Tampa before retiring from the NFL.
Brady noted that he weighed 20 different factors before even considering Tampa as a serious option for him, including the presence of skill players, game day weather, and practice weather. He said financial compensation was also important but not at the top of his list.
“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? 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,” Brady wrote. “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.”
Since Brady left New England, the Patriots have drafted three quarterbacks: Mac Jones, Drake Maye, and Joe Milton.
Jones was traded away after seasons. Maye, who seems poised for success, is set to enter his sophomore campaign with the team. Milton has shown flashes of upside in his current role as backup.
Brady just completed his first season as a broadcaster with NFL on FOX and Belichick took over as head coach of the Unversity of North Carolina.
Download the FREE Boston 25 News app for breaking news alerts.
Follow Boston 25 News on Facebook and Twitter. | Watch Boston 25 News NOW
©2025 Cox Media Group
/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/cmg/7QOJU3BNCJERBNKJC5LWTBYFLU.png)
