Belichick said the club put “everything we had” into the 2019 campaign, and after the wild-card exit, it was clear Brady would move on. TB12 spent three seasons in Tampa, winning a Super Bowl with the Buccaneers in 2020, leading the NFL in yards and touchdowns in 2021 and finishing his career out in 2022.
Part of the Patriots’ downfall came from a slew of missed Belichick draft picks and other personnel decisions near the end of Brady’s run.
“I wish we could have done more, but we went as far as we could,” Belichick said. “And look, he proved it — he played longer than anybody, played at a higher level than anybody. And again, tremendous credit to him. Nobody else did that — that was him.”
Years after their departure, Brady admitted the coach-QB relationship had grown into a “natural tension” that led to the breakup after two decades. But in recent years, each has offered admiration for the other’s accomplishments, noting they couldn’t have accomplished such feats without one another.
“I learned so much from Tom. I never played quarterback,” Belichick said. “Tom saw the game through a quarterback’s eyes. I saw the games through a coach’s eyes. Together, I think we both learned a lot from each other. Tom, how defensive coaches looked at him or looked at offense. Me, on what a quarterback can do and what he can’t do, what’s hard, what’s easy, what I can see, what I can’t see, and how you see the game.
“Tom wasn’t a dominant personality. He was just a great leader. He would do whatever you asked him to do. Honestly, if you told him to go out there and run a reverse and block the defensive end, he’d go block the defensive end. He’d do whatever the team needed him to do, and he was very competitive.”
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