Hall of Fame-bound quarterback Tom Brady has admitted that he knew he needed to leave the New England Patriots to escape rising tensions between himself and head coach Bill Belichick.

The revelation came via a weekly newsletter that Brady pens now that his ties to football, beyond being a minority owner of the Las Vegas Raiders, lie in the FOX Sports commentary booth. At the time of his decision to hit free agency for the first — and only — time, he and Belichick were still seen as the glue holding a fading Patriots dynasty together, but the seven-time Super Bowl winner concedes that it was clear that the time had come to move on.

“It was a creeping decision that lived passively in the back of mind for 2-3 years until March of 2020, when a whirlwind of a few days made me realise that a decision was coming sooner rather than later,” Brady wrote. “The reality was, after twenty years together, a natural tension had developed between where Coach Belichick and I were headed in our careers, and where the Patriots were moving as a franchise. It was the kind of tension that could only be resolved by some kind of split or one of us reassessing our priorities.”

The ‘split’ came with Brady moving on to Tampa Bay, where he would win the last of his Lombardi trophies, but even that decision did not arrive without much soul-searching on the QB’s behalf.

“I wanted to be a great quarterback for most of my life, so I allocated my time and energy to doing the things I believed were essential to becoming great at my position,” he noted. “Later, when I had kids, I wanted to be a great dad and a great quarterback, so I figured out how to allocate my time and energy most effectively to achieve both of those goals.

“When Tampa Bay came into the picture as a serious option for me, all I did over those few days in March was assess and reassess my priorities. I asked myself, as someone headed into their forties with school-age kids and twenty years worth of battle scars, 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 because of guys like Mike Evans and Chris Godwin. 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, it probably wasn’t even top 10 — and it definitely didn’t rank as a 3 in importance.

“In the end, I chose Tampa, almost exactly five years ago now, because, in the aggregate, it graded out higher than New England along those twenty or so dimensions. It’s not much more complicated than that.”