If you were wondering when and how the road to Rob Gronkowski landing in Tampa Bay began, NFL Network's Ian Rapoport offered some potential answers when appearing on "The Greg Hill Show" Wednesday morning.
While there was no set-in-stone blueprint for Gronkowski to join Brady, Rapoport pointed out that the topic had been broached by Brady when he was exploring his free-agent options.
"As soon as Brady went to Tampa I started hearing rumors about this, and I know I wasn't alone," Rapoport noted. "He told people during the process, teams in the process who were actually interested in offers that he wanted to bring Gronk with him. That much I knew. But that was a third of the story because Gronk still needed to actually want to come back and be ready to come back and the Patriots had to deal him. So there were so many things that had to happen."
In terms of how much of a topic Gronkowski partnering up with Brady was when the quarterback met with teams, that remains somewhat of a mystery.
"I don't know if he said, 'I just spoke to Gronk and he wants to come back.' But I do believe it was something that was brought up in discussions with teams, with Bruce Arians, Jason Licht, with the Chargers people. I never got the sense it was like, alright this is in the bag we're both coming back," Rapoport said. "It was more like, 'Here is what I want to do. If this is something you guys want to do let's explore.' Because obviously it would be tampering for the Bucs to talk to Gronk before a deal is done but it's not tampering for players to talk to their friends. It happens in the NBA plenty, not so much in the NFL, but it happens in the NBA plenty for friends to talk to friends."
These two --♂️ @tombrady @gronk
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