Isaiah J. Downing-Imagn Images
New England football fans will remember the day March 20, 2020 for the rest of their lives. That was the day Tom Brady signed a contract to play for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, ending his unprecedented 20-year run of success with coach Bill Belichick and the Patriots.
This week, in his weekly newsletter, Tom Brady finally shed a little more light on how his relationship with Bill Belichick affected his decision to test out free agency in the 2020 offseason.
“I was only involved in free agency once, at the tail-end of my career, when free agency means something very different than it does for a backup coming off a disappointing season or a young guy coming off the last year of his rookie deal,” Brady wrote while addressing the current state of free agency in the NFL.
“For me, it was a creeping decision that lived passively in the back of 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. 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.”
Tom Brady goes on to explain that when he was deciding whether to go play for the Buccaneers or not he came up with “a list of about twenty things” that he ranked and graded on a weighted scale from 1 to 3.
“The presence of skill players was a 3 in terms of importance, for example, and the Bucs graded out as a 3 because of guys like Mike Evans and Chris Godwin The same was true for the head coach,” Brady wrote. “That was a 3 in importance, and Tampa scored a 3 with Bruce Arians. Game day weather was a 2, practice weather was a 3. Financial compensation was on the list, obviously, but it wasn’t first, it probably wasn’t even top 10, and it definitely didn’t rank as a 3 in importance.
“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.
“What can be complicated is figuring out exactly what your priorities are to begin with. I watched so many good guys over the years make mistakes in free agency because they didn’t have their priorities straight. Some of them chased the money to teams that weren’t good fits for them.”