Tom Brady Leaves New England — and Wins Again Anyway

On February 7, 2021, Tom Brady won his seventh Super Bowl — his first with a team other than the New England Patriots, with whom he had won six championships over two decades as perhaps the greatest dynasty in the history of American football. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers defeated the Kansas City Chiefs 31-9 in Super Bowl LV. Brady, 43 years old, was named the game’s Most Valuable Player after throwing for 201 yards and three touchdowns — the oldest player ever to win the award and the only player in NFL history to win it with two different franchises.

The narrative arc of Brady’s 2020 season would have seemed implausible even by the standards of his already extraordinary career. When he departed New England in March 2020 after 20 seasons — parting from coach Bill Belichick, with whom he had built the greatest quarterback-coach partnership in NFL history — it prompted a genuine question no one in the sport had quite had to answer before: how much of the success had been Brady, and how much had been the Patriots system? The question had a subtext: at 42, had Brady made a catastrophic mistake in leaving?

The Buccaneers had not reached the playoffs since 2007. They were a team of significant talent — receivers Mike Evans and Chris Godwin, tight end Rob Gronkowski, whom Brady personally persuaded to come out of retirement — but one that had consistently underperformed. Brady transformed the culture from his first week. He struggled in the early weeks with a new system and new teammates. By January, he had turned the Buccaneers into the first team in NFL history to play and win a Super Bowl in their own home stadium.

The victory cemented Brady’s claim to a status that transcends sport: the most successful player, by traditional measures, in the history of American professional football. Seven Super Bowl wins, five Super Bowl MVPs, three league MVPs, and 22 NFL seasons at the highest level make the counter-arguments increasingly difficult to sustain. But it was the manner of this final championship — chosen, not inherited; built in a new city with new teammates at an age when most players have long retired — that made it the most resonant of all.