Patriots
“We could not put a good team around him.”
Tom Brady’s decision to leave the Patriots in free agency after the 2019 season didn’t just put an end to the Patriots’ two-decade dynasty.
It also marked the beginning of the end for his longtime head coach in Bill Belichick, who went 29-38 over the next four seasons with just one playoff appearance before the Patriots opted to move on following a disastrous four-win season in 2023.
But, in an excerpt from Gary Myers’ new book “Brady vs. Belichick: The Dynasty Debate”, Belichick told Myers that Brady made the right call in opting to leave New England in search of another Super Bowl contender — deeming the situation in Foxborough an “impossible situation” for the star quarterback.
“He absolutely made the right decision. We could not put a good team around him,” Belichick told Myers, as published by The Boston Globe. “Financially, after stretching for ten years, we ran out of cap space and had to rebuild the team; 2019 was our last real opportunity to win; 2020 was a rebuild, and we were back in the playoffs in 2021.”
Despite winning a Super Bowl during the 2018 season, Brady’s final year in Foxborough was rife with speculation that the six-time Super Bowl champion was pondering his future after leading a New England team short on high-end talent.
Even though the 2019 Patriots closed out the year with a 12-4 record, New England fell to Mike Vrabel and the Tennessee Titans, 20-13, in the Wild Card Game at Gillette Stadium.
The 42-year-old Brady also posted one of his more pedestrian stat lines that season — completing 60.8 percent of his passes for just 24 touchdowns and eight interceptions.
But New England also had a diminished receiver corps beyond Julian Edelman (100 catches, 1,117 yards), with Phillip Dorsett standing as the next wideout with the most yardage on the team with just 397 yards on the year.
Brady went on to sign with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in March 2020, eventually leading his new team to a Super Bowl championship that same season. Surrounded by a much deeper roster in Tampa, Brady thrived over his three years with the Bucs — throwing 108 touchdowns and 33 interceptions over that stretch while averaging 4,881 passing yards per season.
As Myers noted in his excerpt, Belichick’s candid comments about the state of the Patriots was somewhat surprising — given that it was years of poor drafting that also contributed to the talent drain hampering New England during Brady’s final years with the team.
“Belichick was responsible for the dismal state of the roster in 2020 after years of questionable drafts, poor free agent signing decisions and not having a Brady succession plan in place after Jimmy Garoppolo was traded to the 49ers in 2017,” Myers wrote. “The 2021 playoff season ended with a 47-17 wild-card loss in Buffalo. Things fell apart for Belichick and the Patriots in 2022, and they imploded the next year. Kraft fired Belichick in January 2024 after a 4–13 season.”
Beyond the state of New England’s roster, Brady acknowledged in a post on his newsletter earlier this year that his relationship with Belichick had been deteriorating over his final years with the Patriots — prompting him to continue his career elsewhere.
“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.”
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