The 2017 NFL season was a very interesting one in New England.
Obviously, Jimmy Garoppolo was traded at the deadline, and there were tons of reports and discussion about how all that went down, who made the ultimate decision and so on.
Then came January of 2018, right when the Patriots were about to make a deep playoff run, and ESPN's Seth Wickerham released a long, detailed piece titled, "For Kraft, Brady and Belichick, is this the beginning of the end?"
The piece went into the power struggles within the organization between the three, etc. New England made it all the way to the Super Bowl that season before ultimately falling to the Eagles. Despite that success, things were not quite right inside the organization when it came to Tom Brady and Bill Belichick.
Speaking on the The Harrison Vapnek Podcast this week (link below, around 9:00), Wickersham went into more detail on that time period -- the 2018 offseason -- and revealed Belichick had spoken to the New York Giants, Washington Football Team and Miami Dolphins about their job openings.
“There was a lot of pushback to that story. But, I felt comfortable with what I was writing and what I was working on," Wickersham said. "At the time, I think there was a sense that Brady wasn’t going anywhere and Bill left the impression that he might be open to a move. There were some reports that came out at the time that the Giants were looking at him. I think he talked to the Washington Football Team and the Dolphins about sort of their openings. And it was unclear whether he was interested or not, but he was still talking to them and subsequent reporting has only sort of shown how in that offseason, Brady skipped the offseason program for the first time in his career and he had just kind of had enough.
"I think [Brady] wanted out of his contract at one point and maybe to be released, and at the end of the day both sides played a little hard ball. I don’t think Kraft was immediately inclined to let him out of his contract, although later he was like, ‘Well, if this is what you really want, we might be open to doing it.’ At that point I think Brady had come around and he was like, ‘Well, I might figure things out on my end.’ It was a fascinating offseason. Remember, he got up on stage in Los Angeles at that tech conference and he said, ‘I plead the fifth’ when asked if he felt appreciated. We never heard that language out of Tom Brady before. It was an interesting offseason to say the least.”
Despite that offseason, the Patriots of course went on to win the Super Bowl the next season over the Rams, but then Brady did leave the Patriots following the next year (2019).
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