When the Patriots eyed their first year without Tom Brady, it was not lost on Bill Belichick that whoever would replace the greatest quarterback in NFL history had to have the right kind of temperament. They needed a kind of aggressive comfort in themselves and a beautiful naivety about what it would look like to simply walk into the door Brady had just walked out of and say: “What’s up, everybody?”
Say what you will about Cam Newton, but in 2020 he was that player personified. It was something Belichick always appreciated about him, which created an ideal buffer between Brady and Mac Jones, whom the Patriots drafted the following offseason and hoped would become the franchise’s next decades-long answer at the position.
Even one of the most notoriously narrative-averse people in NFL history, whose calculated decisions were always about business, could recognize the crushing, black-hole type weight that would have been placed on a rookie quarterback had the Patriots decided to go that route in 2020. Similarly, Belichick realized what it would look like to have Newton hanging around once Jones was on campus, so he released the former league MVP before the ’21 campaign.
