Tom Brady knows a thing or two about NFL dynasties — after all, he led two separate ones during his 19 years with the New England Patriots. He even had a shot at kickstarting another with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers before ultimately retiring to the greener pastures of team ownership and broadcast commentary.
So when the seven-time Super Bowl champion reflected on how he achieved sustained success in the NFL, it carried a little extra weight.
Tom Brady Reveals Keys to New England Patriots’ Championship Culture
In his weekly blog post, released every Monday, Brady shared his take on how to build an effective NFL team. In his view, it all boils down to three major commandments: selflessness, teamwork, and winning.
From Brady’s perspective, once an internal culture is established, the next critical step is ensuring that external additions — players brought in through the draft or free agency — already align with the team’s long-term goals and mindset.
“My Patriots teams were a perfect example of this. Our culture was built around selflessness, teamwork, and winning. We wanted champions, not stars. Everything we did was about identifying or instilling a champion’s mindset in the people who walked through our doors—whether through the draft, free agency or trade,” he recalled.
Brady pointed to several examples from his time in New England to show how deeply that mindset ran.
“With guys like Tedy Bruschi, Julian Edelman, Dont’a Hightower, and Wes Welker to name just a few, we were long on ‘we/us’ and as short as possible on ‘me/I’,” he said.
Looking back on the Patriots’ approach to the draft and free agency during their reign with Brady under center from 2000 to 2019, it’s easy to see how the team lived up to the “champions, not stars” philosophy.
The names Brady mentioned — Bruschi, Edelman, Hightower, and Welker — were just the start. You can add undrafted free agent and Super Bowl 49 hero Malcolm Butler, 2014 fourth-round pick and Super Bowl 51 standout James White, and 2008 fifth-round pick and special teams ace Matthew Slater.
You could spend all day running down the list of players the Patriots added through the draft and free agency who contributed to their six Super Bowl titles, many of whom were far from elite individual talents when they entered the league. And that’s exactly Brady’s point.
“When things are going well and everyone is aligned, it’s easy to see a team’s culture on full display like that: from draft picks and free agents, to re-signings and cuts, to coaching hires, to practice habits and playing philosophy. Everything just makes sense,” Brady concluded.