First your narrative that the Pats kicked Brady out is a lie. Brady LEFT for greener pastures. He knew the Pats were going to go through ANOTHER rebuilding process and he rightfully realized that he needed to go to a team with a better roster if he was going to win #7 They DID invest in him HEAVILY from 2014-19 and put themselves in cap hell doing it.
There is one thing I always ask someone who thinks the Pats should have resigned Brady for $25MM/yr in 2020. Remember that year, with a stripped down roster already, and a QB that cost them $1MM against the cap, and they were STILL in cap hell in 2020 (not to mention that it WOULD have been even worse if Covid hadn't happened and HIghtower, Chung, etc had to count against the cap). Who ELSE would have had to go in order to give Tom his money.
No it made NO sense at all for Tom and it made no sense for the Pats. The PR could have gone better, I guess, but as a football decision, the CORRECT move was made by BOTH parties.
Cost of Brady ($25) was the same cost of Devin McCourty and Joe Thuney (on franchise tag.) They had enough to pay those two veterans and had enough to pay Brady obviously. There was also an additional $12.5M (6.25M twice at different stages of the timeline) hit they took in NOT extending Brady, so there was even more incentive with cap savings. Seems that Team Stidham / Team Cam has a selective memory of the actual events in 2020 when most of you claimed there was no reason to REBUILD because the team simply needed a younger and more invested leader at QB to continue contending.
The Patriots didn't trade championship veteran players for draft picks or let them walk for younger options for a rebuild. They had a chance to trade Gilmore when his value was high in the 2020 offseason and chose not to. They did absolutely nothing that a team in rebuilding mode would actually do. Instead, they re-signed all of their core veteran players in 2020 with the savings from not signing Brady. They could have also structured a Brady deal for a huge delayed hit in 2021, but instead they chose to spend that insane amount of extra cash of free agents, many of whom were horrible deals, but Team Bill scoffed at any criticism and continues to defend signings like Jonnu Smith.
This goes well beyond 2020...you people act like they got themselves into cap hell during the mid-late 2010s in order to keep a championship team in tact. Ridiculous and untrue on so many levels. Their contracts were never backloaded like the Saints, Rams, or other teams truly doing what you claim the Patriots did. This is why the Patriots parted ways with a handful of players like Amendola, Cooks, Jones, Blount, etc. They could have been creative and pushed those cap hits into later years but chose not to, even though, again, they had a massive gap year in 2021 where they could have done this. Everything they did regarding the cap was for year-to-year contention and not sacrificing the future for the present, and it was particularly baffling because of all the empty drafts during that time, so you had a championship roster of veterans without the up and coming rookie contracts to replace them. And yet, you claim the opposite, that the Patriots went "all-in" and sacrificed their cap in order to contend...reading Team Bill is like living in world where everything is upside down.
It's so aggravating that this board is filled with revisionist history and you guys can't just acknowledge the Patriots vastly overestimated their ability to replace Brady. Everyone outside of the Bill cult in New England realizes this. Whether Brady would have returned to New England had they played their cards differently...argumentative...different sources and fake news galore....I don't care to go down that path. In the end, the Patriots had the greatest QB of all-time with more left in the tank and he left an organization that's supposedly the smartest think tank in the world. They could have afforded him and were not rebuilding; they were not in cap hell even if their cap situation in 2020 wasn't ideal. The consensus from this board, the media, and sources close to the team at the time were all in unison that this had to do with the Patriots feeling they were okay with their system, coaches, roster, and financial discipline to part ways with a player who was no longer happy, could no longer perform at the same level, and was likely going to embarass himself by continuing to play at his advanced age.
