Tom Brady: Tension I had with Bill Belichick could only be resolved with a split

Tom Brady says that in his final years in New England, he began to realize that he and coach Bill Belichick were not on the same page.

In a reflection on NFL free agency that he posted to his website, Brady talked about the only time he was a free agent: When he left New England for Tampa Bay five years ago. Brady says that in the final years of his final contract with the Patriots, he knew something had to change.

"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," Brady wrote. "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."

Brady says that as he weighed leaving the Patriots, he listed his most important priorities and came to the conclusion that the Buccaneers were a better fit for him.

"What I ended up with was a list of about twenty things that I then ranked and graded on a weighted scale from 1 to 3," Brady wrote. "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. 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."

The split with Belichick and the Patriost worked out well for Brady, who won the Super Bowl in his first year in Tampa Bay.

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