Tom Brady knew it was time for a change in March 2020.
Brady was coming off his 20th season with the New England Patriots when he hit NFL free agency for the first time. At that point, the legendary quarterback knew it was going to be nearly impossible to keep an iconic union together in Foxboro, Mass.
“The reality was, after 20 years together, a natural tension had developed between where Coach (Bill) Belichick and I were headed in our careers, and where the Patriots were moving as a franchise,” Brady wrote in a newsletter released Monday. “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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Choosing to leave his longtime NFL home only was Step 1 for Brady that spring, though. The future Pro Football Hall of Famer then had to pick a new team, and that decision was reached via a calculated process.
“What I ended up with was a list of about 20 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.
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“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.”
Brady’s decision proved to be the right one, as he won his seventh Super Bowl in his first season in Tampa Bay and helped the Bucs claim the NFC South in his final two campaigns. The Patriots, meanwhile, are on their fifth starting quarterback and third head coach since Brady’s exit five years ago.