It’s been more than five years since Tom Brady – arguably the greatest NFL player of all time — left the New England Patriots after 20 years in Massachusetts.
In those two decades with the Patriots, Brady won six Super Bowls and appeared in three others. He also won three MVPs and laid the foundation for a career in which he established the NFL career record for nearly every notable passing statistic.
However, New England wasn’t the only stop in his career, as Brady did what most adults do as they get older: he moved to Florida. In the final three years of his career, the Golden Boy was busy leading the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to a Super Bowl trophy and two division titles. For good measure, he also finished second in MVP voting in his penultimate season.
Now a half-decade removed from his lone free agency tour, Brady has finally expounded upon his decision to leave the Patriots.
Tom Brady Explains Decision To Leave Patriots for Buccaneers
Brady, who has a weekly newsletter called “The 199”, reflected in his latest post about the unique job of covering NFL free agency as an on-air talent for FOX.
Of course, he always had to pay attention to the league’s maneuvering during his playing days, but, as he explains in the piece linked above, it was only during his own free agency that he began to realize how much of a whiplash changing teams can be.
“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 quarterback wrote.
“The reality was, after 20 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 continued.
“When Tampa Bay came into the picture as a serious option for me, all I did over those few days in March was assess and reassess my priorities. I asked myself, as someone headed into their 40s with school-age kids and 20 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 one to three.”
Brady went on to explain that the Buccaneers scored high in metrics that mattered most to him, including skill player talent (he specifically cited Mike Evans and Chris Godwin), the presence of head coach Bruce Arians, weather, and money.
Ultimately, he concluded that “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.”
Brady, who also plays an important role in the Las Vegas Raiders organization as a minority owner, had a different free agent experience than most as the greatest quarterbacks ever. However, his insights do offer some perspective on what players value most as they weigh the decision to change teams.
If nothing else, his words can also provide some closure to Patriots fans that never quite got over TB12 leaving for greener pastures at the end of his career.