Thanks to the efforts of Drake Maye and the New England Patriots, a lot of people are fighting bouts of déjà vu right now. For the first time since 2016, the Patriots have finally managed to claim a 14-win regular season record and a top-two seed in the AFC playoff race.
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It’s resulted in all sorts of comparisons between the sophomore QB and his predecessor, Tom Brady, and in light of their 16-3 beating of the Los Angeles Chargers in the Wild Card round, the same is now also true in regards to Maye’s head coach, Mike Vrabel, and his predecessor, Bill Belichick. According to one of their former teammates in Devin McCourty, however, it remains highly unlikely that anyone will ever actually come close to replicating what Brady and Belichick were able to do throughout their time together.
“[Brady] was the one that dad loved the most so dad got him on the most because he knew how special he was,” McCourty jokingly recalled during his latest interview with Kay Adams. “Tom would always go to our captain’s meetings and go ‘Hey. You’ve guys have gotta ask Bill, because if I ask him, he’s not going to do it… He’s the oldest. He’s the favorite. It just got showed in different ways. They had a special bond that nobody else understood.”
While he certainly seemed to suggest that the favoritism was a bit much at times, McCourty is likely okay with how everything turned out, given that he was able to become a three-time Super Bowl champion in his own right. Unfortunately for everyone in New England, including him, that favoritism would eventually fizzle out and result in the first and only free agency period of Brady’s career.
The seven-time Super Bowl winner has since explained that “a natural tension” developed between him and Belichick throughout the years, and that by the time COVID-19 was a thing, they were pretty much done with each other. In an open letter that he penned last year, Brady explained that “It was the kind of tension that could only be resolved by some kind of split or one of us reassessing our priorities.”
As to how he chose the Tampa Bay Buccaneers exactly, well, he simply sat down and made a list. According to the man himself, he simply started by asking, “What truly mattered to me now?”
“What I ended up with was a list of about twenty things that I then ranked and graded on a weighted scale from 1 to 3. The presence of skill players was a 3 in terms of importance, for example, and the Bucs graded out as a 3… The same was true for the head coach. That was a 3 in importance, and Tampa scored a 3 with Bruce Arians. Game day weather was a 2, practice weather was a 3. Financial compensation was on the list, obviously, but it wasn’t first… In the end, I chose Tampa… because, in the aggregate, it graded out higher than New England along those twenty or so dimensions.”
Suffice to say, for as good as they may be, it’s going to be a while, if ever, before Maye and Vrabel are able to legitimize their comparisons to the Patriots of old, as there’s just simply too much nostalgia and history attached to the ones who came before them to really justify the debate right now.
