Five years ago the Tampa Bay Buccaneers were thrust back into the mainstream of NFL relevance, and nobody has looked back since. It all started when Tom Brady decided to leave the New England Patriots to sign with the Bucs, forever altering the course of the franchise and changing everything we knew about how to enjoy the team.
Bucs fans remember how brutal the 2010s were, specifically the early part of the decade when they barely felt like a football team. To go from that to winning a Super Bowl just a few years after having the No. 1 overall pick is a tremendous trajectory that nobody expected to experience, and it took a historic decision to help make a reality.
Brady leaving the Patriots was earth-shattering in its own right, but the fact that he chose to come to Tampa Bay was seismic. He was trolled at the time, with everyone having the same joke about a rich notheasterner coming to Florida to retire, but Brady brought a second Super Bowl to Tampa and did so by crushing the spirits of some of the game’s greatest players along the way.
Perhaps nobody was more crushed than the fans he left behind in New England, who are being forced to re-live one of the lowest points of their fandom.
Bucs fans will love hearing Tom Brady explain why he chose to sign with Tampa Bay
In his most recent newsletter, Brady got brutally honest about why he left New England to join Tampa Bay. We’ve seen the quotes about tension between him and Bill Belichick floating around, but the specific focus on Tampa Bay is something that Patriots fans might not be thrilled to hear about.
“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 forties with school-age kids and twenty years worth of battle scars, what truly mattered to me now,” 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.“
It’s hard to not see that as a dig at New England, although spending two decades in the same place runs the risk of making things stale. This isn’t the first time a pairing has run its course — Andy Reid and the Eagles are another iconic example of this.
What twists the knife even more is the fact that is sounds like Brady has his sights set on the Bucs long before it actually happened. There have been stories over the years about the process he went through to find a new team, and Brady himself has even mentioned that the Chicago Bears were of interest to him at one point, but that’s all window dressing.
From what Brady laid out in breaking down his decision, Tampa Bay was always where he was going to end up.
It never gets old to hear and remember how the greatest quarterback of all-time chose the Buccaneers. A franchise that has often existed on the fringe of relevance was hand-picked by Tom Brady so that he could win one more Super Bowl — that will always rule to hear.
Thanks to Brady the Bucs remain in a great spot versus where they were just a handful of years before he arrived. Baker Mayfield has taken the groundwork laid down by Brady and crafted it into an identity the team has always needed.
While the success continues long after the era ended Buccaneers fans should and always wil be indebted to what Tom Brady brought to the franchise and how he helped change it’s course.
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