Around 2013, Boston Globe’s Greg Bedard was weighing a job offer from Peter King’s newly launched MMQB at Sports Illustrated. On the flight back from the NFL Scouting Combine, he happened to be seated across the aisle from the New England Patriots then-head coach Bill Belichick in first class. Bedard used the walk from the gate to baggage claim to ask Belichick if Bedard would fit the MMQB role. Belichick’s answer was a mix of a compliment and an accusation.

“He said, ‘Greg, I think you’ve done a great job. There’s a lot of stuff that you write about us,’” Bedard recalled on his Patriots Podcast. “‘We thought you had a mole in the building because it was right in line with how we were talking about the team, certain players, things like that. And we thought for sure you had this great mole, this great source in the building.’”

Bedard told him there was no mole. It was just film study and conversations with league sources that had produced reporting sharp enough to rattle Belichick’s own staff. Belichick believed him and gave his blessing for the MMQB job.

“He’s like, ‘Well, you did a great job. I don’t think they could get anybody better to do that job,’” Bedard added.

And that was enough. Bedard took the MMQB job. The role, as he later put it, “never worked out the way Peter and I envisioned for a bunch of different reasons.” He sat on the Belichick conversation for years, deciding it wasn’t his to make public. He’s only talking now because, as he put it, others (Belichick included) are “telling tales out of school.”

The Patriots at that time were not a program that tolerated information going sideways. This was a dynasty stuck mid-stride, having lost two consecutive Super Bowl appearances (XLVI, XLVII). The roster that offseason was gutted with injuries, and franchise quarterback Tom Brady didn’t have a single returning starter or tight end. His favorite security blanket on the field, tight end Rob Gronkowski, came off multiple forearm surgeries in May, only to have a back surgery in June that’d sideline him till November.

Against that backdrop, Bedard’s analysis matched the tone inside the building – it was the kind of thing that prompts a head coach to start asking questions internally. The fact that this story is only coming out now – more than a decade later – says something about how seriously Bill Belichick treated the access to his franchise.

But this isn’t the only new story about the legendary Patriots coach. Belichick has been telling his own story lately – and one of them centers on the night the dynasty ended: when Tom Brady walked out.

Bill Belichick justifies Brady’s exit

In the 2019 offseason, Brady wanted a long-term deal, like the four or three-year deals he’d gotten used to at that point. But the Patriots handed him a two-year deal instead. His contract allowed him to become a free agent at the end of the season, and that’s what he did. While that was the financial aspect of it all, Brady was never about the money. Bill Belichick has now shared where the roster stood that year, and why a split was the only option on the table.

“Tom leaving was absolutely the right thing for him to do,” Belichick said on Hang Out with Sean Hannity on May 19th. “We didn’t have a good team in 2020. We just didn’t have a good football team. We had all those guys that left – Gronkowski and [Julian] Edelman. Most of our team was gone. [Devin] McCourty and a few others were still there, but they were about to go too. We were just at the end.”

But it wasn’t over for Brady. He moved to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 2020 to get his seventh Super Bowl ring and prove that the previous six weren’t just because of his old team. Belichick, who stayed with a collapsing Patriots squad until 2023, saw his old quarterback find the success he couldn’t have with Belichick’s roster.

“I was happy for him that things worked out well for him in Tampa, because he was with a team,” Belichick said. “It wouldn’t have gone well in 2020 in New England. On this, I can guarantee you that.”

Without Brady, New England went 7-9, missing the playoffs for the first time since 2008.

Brady himself framed his exit as a sort of falling out. When Brady penned an edition of his 199 newsletter in March 2025, he made it clear that it was inevitable.

“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,” Brady noted. “It was the kind of tension that could only be resolved by some kind of split or one of us reassessing our priorities.”

But in this case, Belichick revealed, the Patriots already knew Brady had one foot out the door. He left because the alternative would have buried his final years in a 7-win rebuild instead of that seventh ring. As for Belichick, Brady became just another casualty – albeit the biggest – of a roster that couldn’t compete anymore.

“I wish we could have done more, but we went as far as we could,” Belichick added. “And look, he proved it – he played longer than anybody, played at a higher level than anybody. And again, tremendous credit to him. Nobody else did that – that was him.”

When Tom Brady left for Tampa Bay, New England bade him farewell with billboard messages that thanked him for his service. Greg Bedard covered the peak of that dynasty closely enough to get accused of having a spy in the building. Belichick built it, watched it end, and is now the one talking. But for one glorious stretch in New England, the work all three of these men did made the other two better.