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Amid the applause between Tom Brady and Bill Belichick as they prepare for Sunday’s Tampa Bay-New England game in Foxborough, there remains an underlying question that fuels the NFL soap opera.
Did the best quarterback and coach in the league really need to go their separate ways in the spring of 2020?
It was the end of a two-decade, six-Super Bowl title partnership. Brady is of course top of the scoreboard after the breakup. He added a seventh Lombardi Trophy. Belichick was 8-11 at that point.
Belichick spoke of his “respect” and “appreciation” for Brady on Monday. Last week Brady noted his “respect” and “admiration” for Belichick. It follows 18 months of subtleties. At one point, Belichick even mentioned the “keyword” – “a great relationship built on love”.
Either way, everything is fine, but Brady is leading a proxy battle more clearly via his trainer, Alex Guerrero, who theorized that Belichick had driven Brady out by the way he had treated him.
“I think [Belichick’s] emotions or feelings never changed with age, ”Guerrero told the Boston Herald. “I think over time, with Tom, as Tom was in his late 30s or early 40s, I think Bill was still trying to treat him like that.” old kid he wrote. And all the players, I think, realized that Tom was different.
“He’s older, so he should be treated differently,” Guerrero continued. “And all the players, none of them would have cared that he was treated any differently. I think that was Bill’s thing. He never evolved. So you can ‘Don’t treat someone. who’s in his 40s like he’s 20. It doesn’t work. “
It is probably the most precise place of the conflict. Belichick treated Brady as much as he could like a regular player and after all these years and maturity Brady wanted more, including a “retire-a-patriot” contract. It never materialized and Brady left for a much better Buccaneer team and a friendly coach-player relationship with Bruce Arians, where he could win a Super Bowl.
“We weren’t as good an option as Tampa,” Belichick said on WEEI’s “Greg Hill Show” on Monday. “It wasn’t a question of not wanting to. That’s for sure.”
Uh. At Guerrero’s point, of course, there were ways to show you wanted him more.
Yet in Belichick’s defense, this is not how things work at Foxborough. Already. Even with Tom Brady.
Conventional wisdom might suggest that a coach should consider a future Hall of Fame 40 and 20 more as a partner than a player, but Belichick hasn’t won all of those games being conventional. The team is the team. The players are the players.
One of the strengths of the Brady-Belichick marriage was the way newcomers would marvel at Belichick disguising Brady – the great Tom Brady – at movie sessions as if he was an outdated rookie. It helped to permeate discipline throughout the building. It’s the Patriot Way. It worked, to say the least.
Brady is an exceptional player but he doesn’t have all those Super Bowls without Belichick being an exceptional coach. Or vice versa, of course. One of Brady’s gifts was recognizing it early on and limiting himself to a very difficult circumstance where yesterday never mattered and good enough didn’t exist. The two made each other.
So to suggest that Belichick could shift gears and make an exception is not based on reality. He makes no exceptions. That’s the point. Had he done so, some of his other beloved players – Tedy Bruschi or Willie McGinest or Junior Seau or Rob Gronkowski or Mike Vrabel – would have previously been treated differently.
He is a coach who has not hesitated to replace Brady with Drew Bledsoe, or remove Ty Law or let go of talents ranging from Richard Seymour to Chandler Jones.
There’s no way the system would have lasted all these years if Belichick had that sentimentality in him. This rigidity made it so successful that you have to think of Brady as a Buc under the deal.
Plus, no coach and quarterback has ever lasted so long or won so much. Is it fair to complain that it doesn’t last… longer?
And while Guerrero might say that “the players, none of them would have cared that he was treated any differently,” that’s just a theory. Let Belichick, not a coach, know how to lead a team.
If not treating Brady in a special way as he got “older” was a bad strategy, how do you explain the four Super Bowl appearances and the three titles after TB12 was 37? Belichick’s system worked well, even if it meant Brady would eventually leave.
Whatever the reason, Tampa was the perfect place for Brady. New England is in a long overdue reconstruction. Salaries have risen and are suffering from decades of late draft picks, he missed a season 7-9 a year ago. It’s 1-2 this year, but even with free agent spending, the offense is plagued by the same issues as Brady’s last season – a porous offensive line, a lack of game breakers.
Brady is 44 years old. The only reason to play at this age is to win championships. He clearly has the team to do it, including making sure Rob Gronkowski, also treated like he’s “not special” in New England, retires.
So everyone is where they’re supposed to be now, just like everyone else was where they were supposed to be all those successful years. An uncompromising coach never compromised, even with a quarterback who had, in the eyes of outsiders, won a compromise.
It might not be the end of a storybook, but those Super Bowl banners that Brady will run out on Sunday night while wearing pewter and gray won’t come down either.
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