National Football League

Tom Brady and Bill Belichick: Inside the closed-door postgame conversation

Published Oct. 4, 2021 8:24 p.m. ET

By Martin Rogers
FOX Sports Columnist

Maybe the conversation wasn’t as interesting as you’d think. Maybe it was a lot of platitudes with a bit of "how’s your family?" thrown in. Perhaps the stories shared and memories regaled were incidental and minor, rather than the way we’d imagine it, which is as some epic retelling of the finest moments of a historic football partnership.

But is there any conversation in sports for which you’d love to have been a fly on the wall more than this one? As Sunday night crossed into Monday morning, Bill Belichick went looking for Tom Brady in the visitors locker room at Gillette Stadium. He found him, and the pair had something to chat about for around 25 minutes.

We’re not going to know what the topics were because they’re not going to say. We probably won’t hear who did the bulk of the talking or if there were some laughs shared. Belichick doesn’t reveal anything publicly that he doesn’t have to, and Brady wasn’t biting.

"All those are personal," he said when asked about the details of what was said. "We’ve got a personal relationship for 20-plus years. He drafted me here. We've had a lot of personal conversations that should remain that way and are very private."

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Tom Brady and Bill Belichick had an approximately 25-minute conversation in the visitors locker room following their game Sunday night.

For a moment, it looked as if there might be some lingering awkwardness from the now-separated duo who combined for the small matter of six Super Bowl rings.

Belichick’s New England Patriots did a masterful defensive job of containing their former quarterback on Sunday. However, it wasn’t quite enough, as the Tampa Bay Buccaneers squeaked out a 19-17 victory when Pats kicker Nick Folk saw his 56-yard field-goal attempt drift into the upright as time ran out.

If it hadn’t, Brady would’ve had just under a minute to get the Bucs into field-goal range. How delicious an ending would that have been?

But we can’t always get what we want, and as close as this game was, the storyline was always going to be about Brady and Belichick, who hadn’t spoken, it is believed, since Brady left New England. Reports have suggested that Brady was hurt that the coach did not want to meet at Foxborough to see him off once his decision was made.

Things were tense and made tenser by public comments from Brady’s father, Tom Sr., and mentor, Alex Guerrero, that did not cast Belichick in a good light. Then, after the Bucs won Sunday, the on-field exchange was momentary.

Rarely has a postgame on-field meeting been more greatly anticipated. The cameras made sure they were ready for it. Yet while Brady had a long hug for offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels and for plenty of former teammates, Belichick interacted with him for no more than a second before heading off.

But that was just what we saw on television. It wasn’t the real story.

"So much is made of our relationship," Brady said later. "But nothing is really accurate that I ever see. It's all kind of — definitely doesn't come from my personal feelings or beliefs."

Away from the cameras and the spotlight, Belichick made a gesture, and it wasn’t a small one. He could have met Brady in a corridor, could have invited him into his office, could have done it some other way, but instead, he went to him, went into the one part of Gillette that he doesn’t make a habit of frequenting.

People show their respect and love in different ways. Brady tells everyone that he loves them, calls many of his teammates "baby," unwittingly sparked a silly controversy when he kissed his son in a documentary and never met a hug he didn’t like.

Belichick is not that way and never will be, but when one of the greatest coaches who has ever lived heads to the enemy locker room to have a conversation, it means something.

"Hurt feelings, slights or misunderstandings drove them apart," Dan Wetzel wrote for Yahoo Sports. "Or maybe Belichick just bet on the idea that no one could be an elite quarterback at age 44, so he moved the franchise on to the inevitable rebuild. Then Brady proved him wrong."

And so it is. For now, for certain, Tampa Bay's immediate future is brighter than New England’s. The Patriots played an excellent game — "Belichick coached better than Brady played," FS1’s Chris Broussard said on "First Things First" — but it wasn’t enough.

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That’s how it goes sometimes, when you’re up against a historically great QB instead of having one to call upon. It changes the decisions you make, it affects how you feel and the perception of a lead or deficit.

Maybe that was one of the things they chatted about. Who knows?

This was the game the league had been waiting for, the fixture circled on the calendar months in advance, and now it has come and gone. It was anticipated for the soap opera element, centered on the extraordinary reality that two iconic football figures who for so long had been intertwined seemed to have some beef.

It feels like that’s finished now. The talking has taken place, by the people who were supposed to do it. It was quite a show, for quite a while. Now it’s time to move on to something else.

Martin Rogers is a columnist for FOX Sports and the author of the FOX Sports Insider Newsletter. You can subscribe to the newsletter here.