Tom Brady will not apologize for the stress he placed on his Tampa Bay teammates.
Recently, comments emerged from current Bucs quarterback Baker Mayfield about the vibe in the time when Brady was running the show.
“The building was a little bit different with Tom in there,” Mayfield said. “Obviously, playing-wise, Tom is different. He had everybody dialed in, high-strung environment, so I think everybody was pretty stressed out. They wanted me to come in, be myself, bring the joy back to football for guys who weren’t having as much fun.”
Brady, who’s in Tampa working the Eagles-Bucs game, responded to Mayfield’s remarks.
“I thought stressful was not having Super Bowl rings,” Brady said during the Fox broadcast. “So there was a mindset of a champion I took to work every day. This wasn’t day care. If I wanted to have fun I was gonna go to Disneyland with my kids. . . . There’s a way to approach this game, and that’s with the right mindset and try to push each other outside of our comfort zone and great teammates do that. You come in, I have someone like [Rob] Gronkowski, I have someone like [Mike] Evans. There’s high expectations for us. We gotta make sure we go out there and deliver.”
On-air partner Kevin Burkhardt observed that Brady’s competitive juices are still flowing.
“Still in there,” Brady said. “No apologies.”
It wasn’t fully and completely in there during Brady’s final year in Tampa, and it’s hard not to wonder whether the teammates whom Brady placed under stress during the 2020 and 2021 seasons felt a little resentful when he left for more than a week during training camp and then took an in-season break to attend the wedding of Patriots owner Robert Kraft, meeting the team in Pittsburgh in lieu of traveling with his teammates.
Regardless, Brady’s approach worked. Those who were there in 2020 got a Super Bowl ring for it.
