REAL STAKES OF BRADY VS. BELICHICK ARE COMPLICATED
FOXBORO — For all that separates them, the thousands of miles and simmered animosity, somehow and some way, Tom Brady and Bill Belichick are still perfectly in lockstep. Ahead of their long-awaited reunion Sunday, they’ve run the same media playbook this week in New England and Tampa Bay. The Patriots hosting Brady’s Buccaneers is not about them, they claim. What it represents, they say, is a test for their respective football teams. And when asked about the other, Belichick reflexively lobbed bouquets at Brady on Wednesday, before Brady returned the favor during his own press conference Thursday.
Because the Belichick-era Patriots have always treated truth as a sacrificial lamb at the altar of winning. No NFL team has buried more bodies or feelings than the Pats. In an honest moment this week, Brady admitted to the Wall Street Journal he felt trained in New England to say what Belichick wanted.
What the world wants from them now — their deepest feelings about what it means to face one another — will probably never surface. Sharing doesn’t serve Brady or Belichick, who can appreciate the magnitude of their moment, but refuse to get lost in it because that could mean losing on Sunday. Still, it’s a shame.
Their words have power. Brady continues to forge and live his own truth, speaking unprecedented success and longevity into existence. Belichick is the world’s foremost NFL historian. If they won’t declare Sunday’s stakes — the substance beneath all the fluff of speculation and storylines — who will?
Perhaps a bridge between the two men: Tedy Bruschi. The Patriots Hall of Famer is a confidant for both Brady and Belichick. From his training camp visits, Bruschi knew the front office believed strongly in Mac Jones weeks before it cut Cam Newton. Ten years ago, Brady confided a private desire to play into his 40s to Bruschi, something the world hadn’t even imagined yet.
What Bruschi knows is this: Brady is burning for victory.
“It’s important. This is important to him. And he won’t say it, but this is going to be a good one for him to win,” Bruschi told the Herald. “He wants it, and he wants to get that victory. And it’s almost like the whole completion of turning the page for him.”
There it is: closure. What’s at stake for Brady is not the thrill of victory, but the greatest gift it bestows: the power to write history.
If Brady wins, he leaves town with the pen. He closes his New England chapter, not because he was coldly nudged out the door, but because he swung it open in 2020, then returned and shut it himself.
“He went somewhere else and won a Super Bowl. Point proven. Game over,” Bruschi said. “But I still think — I just don’t know — that isn’t how he thinks. Although the game may not be all that important, what’s important to Tom is still proving a point.”
While the world rages in a useless debate over whether Brady or Belichick deserved more credit for their accomplishments, Belichick is moving forward. He understands the ink on the Patriots dynasty is dry. Picking him or Brady begs the same question about who builds a skyscraper: its architect or the men who erect the steel and lay the concrete?
The answer is stop asking, and just marvel at the magnificence of human achievement.
Together, Brady and Belichick did more than win six Super Bowls. They created an entire economy around Foxboro. They redefined excellence in American sport.
They allowed fans to share in that success and see themselves and imagine what it might be like to shatter limits in their own lives. To defy age, odds and even rules.
What happens Sunday, when they come together again but stand firmly apart, cannot touch what they built together. Those are not the stakes.
“I think if we lived in a perfect world, we’d get to see this (in the Super Bowl). But I think if you are a staunch believer that Tom Brady is the main reason for the Patriots’ success and he loses in this game, I don’t think you’re changing your opinion. And vice versa,” said NFL Network analyst Daniel Jeremiah. “So I think everybody’s kind of in their camps, and I think it means a lot to both those guys, but I don’t think any conclusions can be drawn from that one.”
And what about revenge?
A man who knows about revenge, former Colts general manager Bill Polian, whose only Super Bowl win with Indianapolis came at the Pats’ expense, doesn’t see it. He and Belichick are on better terms now, speaking over the summer at the
Pro Football Hall of Fame.
“This is a regular-season game. Week 4. It’s a great story for Week 4, but it’s not even a tiebreaker,” said Polian, a Hall of Famer himself and an analyst on SiriusXM. “Now if it was being played in the Super Bowl, that’s a different story.”
A story. Naturally Belichick and the Patriots have minimized those this week, in favor of hard statistics, scouting reports and practices.
“I don’t think it’s like a tell-all of the season on how we play in
Week 4, good or bad,” Pats safety Devin McCourty said.
“I don’t think that dictates the rest of the season.”
Because after all the hoopla and hype, the four quarters of football, the postgame handshakes and media scrutiny Sunday, the Patriots will inevitably look ahead. Brady and the Bucs will board a bus that takes them to a plane, and they will fly south, while Belichick sits with the film of his latest victory or defeat. Its meaning to him will ultimately lie in whatever lessons he can apply to the next game, the cycle of Sundays during football season.
And whenever the greatest coach and quarterback of all time reconvene again, to stand apart or come together, the world will be waiting, ready to marvel once more.