It’s hard to believe that a half-decade has already passed since Tom Brady made his decision to sign with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Where one era ended — the Patriots dynasty died the moment Brady left New England — another was born.
Tampa Bay hasn’t been the same since Brady arrived, and the good times didn’t stop rolling with his departure back in 2023. At the time things were a little dicey, as it didn’t seem the Bucs had a clean way to navigate out of the Brady era, but the team managed to parlay his time in Tampa into one of the most successful eras in franchise history.
It’s an era that is still going strong, even though Brady hasn’t played a down in two years. Baker Mayfield is the captain of the ship now, but part of the reason the Bucs continue to have success stems from a revelation Brady made about why he left New England and decided to join Tampa Bay five years ago.
Tom Brady reveals the reason he decided to sign with the Buccaneers in 2020
In his most recent newsletter — yup, Tom Brady has a newsletter — he got brutally honest about the reason he left New England after 22 seasons. More than than, he dove into three key reasons why he ended up deciding Tampa Bay was where he wanted to spend the final chapter of his Hall of Fame career.
We’ve known that Brady has a list of things he looked for in teams he was considering signing with, but he broke down the specifics and how the Bucs checked every box.
"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. 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... 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."
We’ve heard endorsements of the Buccaneers in the past, but it never gets old to be reminded of just how legit the team was even when nobody else was giving them credit. Brady choosing Tampa Bay in free agency was the ultimate validation, and it’s currency that continues to pay off all of these years later.
As for why he left New England, Brady confirmed what we’ve all been assuming over the years in terms of the tension building up between himself and Bill Belichick.
"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," Brady wrote. "It was the kind of tension that could only be resolved by some kind of split or one of us reassessing our priorities."
That’s not exactly new information, nor is it particularly earth-shattering stuff, but it’s still interesting to hear confirmed from Brady himself. We’ve all suspected, even at the time, that the relationship had run its course and this puts that theory to rest once and for all.
There will surely be other things that come out about the end of the Patriots dynasty, but it’s not the first time a historic pairing has split this way and it won’t be the last. What will forever be notable is that the Bucs were the ones who benefited the most from the dissolution of the NFL’s greatest dynasty and Tampa Bay will forever be part of the story.
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