New England Patriots
“We just didn’t have a good football team.”
Tom Brady and Bill Belichick spent 20 seasons together with the Patriots. Jim Davis/The Boston Globe
May 19, 2026 | 5:48 PM
4 minutes to read
The New England Patriots’ two-decade dynasty came to a close in March 2020 after Tom Brady left New England to sign with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
It was a devastating shift of fortunes for New England and head coach Bill Belichick, with the Patriots going 29-38 over the next four seasons with just one playoff appearance before Belichick and New England “parted ways” in January 2024.
Meanwhile, Brady played another three seasons in Tampa, winning Super Bowl LV over the Chiefs in January 2021 and continuing to play at a high level up to his retirement after the 2022 season.
Over his three years in Tampa, Brady completed 66.7 percent of his passes for 14,643 yards with 108 touchdowns and 33 interceptions. He finished in second place in MVP voting in 2021.
Brady’s exit from New England while still having plenty left in the tank was a disastrous development for the Patriots and Belichick.
But, speaking on Fox News Media’s “Hang Out with Sean Hannity” on Tuesday morning, Belichick said that Brady’s decision to leave for another team was the right call for the legendary QB.
“Tom leaving was absolutely the right thing for him to do,” Belichick said. “We didn’t have a good team in 2020. We just didn’t have a good football team. We had all those guys that left — [Rob] Gronkowski and [Julian] Edelman. Most of our team was gone. [Devin] McCourty and a few others were still there, but they were about to go too. We were just at the end.
“And honestly, I was happy for him that things worked out well for him in Tampa, because he was with a team … and then he went on and won. That made me happy for him, because Tom — it wouldn’t have gone well in 2020 in New England. On this, I can guarantee that.”
Belichick’s comments about the state of the Patriots after the 2019 season were valid — with Brady’s odds of leading a legitimate Super Bowl contender in New England all but dashed had he stayed for the last few seasons of his career.
However, Belichick’s own personnel decisions played a large part in Brady’s eventual exit, with New England’s lackluster roster by 2019 a direct result of years of poor drafting by Belichick as the franchise’s top executive when it came to roster management.
In 2019 alone, the decision to select N’Keal Harry with the 32nd overall pick over future star wideouts like A.J. Brown or Deebo Samuel gave Brady few receiving targets to turn to during his final year in Foxborough.
“We put everything we had into the 2019 season, including paying him a lot of money at the end of the year without anything attached to it,” Belichick said of Brady. “There was no first right of refusal, there was no franchise tag, nothing. And so we all understood that there was a good chance he would leave. And I think he made a great career decision, obviously.
“I wish we could have done more, but we went as far as we could. 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.”
In a post in his newsletter from March 2025, Brady also acknowledged that “natural tension” with Belichick led to his decision to end his career elsewhere — and that such an exit was in the works for two or three years before the 2020 campaign began.
“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.”
Despite Brady’s rocky exit in New England, both the former Patriots QB and head coach seemingly have been on good terms since their respective tenures in Foxborough came to a close. Belichick returned to Gillette Stadium for Brady’s Patriots Hall of Fame ceremony in June 2024.
Speaking to Hannity, Belichick continued to offer up praise for how Brady conducted himself over his 20 seasons with New England.
“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,” Belichick later added. “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.”
Conor Ryan is a staff writer covering the Bruins, Celtics, Patriots, and Red Sox for Boston.com, a role he has held since 2023.
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