"The Dynasty" finale goes inside the power struggle between Bill Belichick, Tom Brady and Robert Kraft

"Tommy is the greatest in the 100-year history of the game, and I think he represented a threat to Bill's full power. He didn't want Tommy there."
--Robert Kraft

BOSTON -- At long last, "The Dynasty" has arrived where it set out to get from the start: The end.

While "The Dynasty" was purportedly about the chokehold the Patriots had on the rest of the NFL for two decades, it framed just about every bit of success with respect to the way it all ended. That much was apparent from the first teaser trailer that hit social media months ago, and now the events that led to Tom Brady departing in 2020 are finally being explored in great detail in the final episode, titled "End Game."

Robert Kraft Was Willing To Trade Tom Brady After Eagles Super Bowl

You may recall Tom Brady ending his own docuseries by staring into the camera and saying players need answers to the question, "What are we doing this for?" Obviously, the Super Bowl loss to the Eagles -- when Malcolm Butler was benched -- was a tough pill to swallow for many Patriots. And for Brady, whose personal trainer was banished from team facilities during that year, the feeling was a little stronger.

As such, Brady and his then-wife were invited to owner Robert Kraft's house shortly after that Super Bowl loss, a meeting during which Kraft offered to trade Brady away if he wanted to go somewhere else.

"The tension between Bill and Tom was clear. I asked Tommy to come over to my house and air out what was going on," Kraft said. "Tommy and Gisele came to my house and they were really upset. I had Gisele say, 'That effing Belichick, he doesn't treat my Tommy like a man.' She thought Bill was disrespectful to Tommy and that it was time to move on. I realized how bad the situation was. And I said, 'Look, Tommy, if you wanna go, I'll work it out so you can go.'"

Had Brady wanted to leave the organization at that point, then the Patriots certainly wouldn't have that sixth Super Bowl banner hanging in Gillette Stadium.

As for the meeting, Brady didn't want to describe what was discussed at that meeting.

"Yeah, I mean," Brady said, trying to cut off the question before a long gaze into the void. "Yeah, there are things that I'd like to keep to myself. Look, there's no perfect relationship, you know. And there's things that are said and are done that can't be [unsaid] or undone."

Belichick And Brady Didn't Talk To Each Other

In 2017, Belichick took away most of Guerrero's access to the team. In 2018, most of those privileges were reinstated by Kraft, as Brady wanted to stay with the Patriots but required certain concessions.

"Bill was pissed," Kraft said. "Allowing Alex Guerrero back, it was the one time through 20 years I really have stepped in and got involved. ... Bill felt this was really a questioning of his authority and his ability to govern, but I had the greatest player and the greatest coach. I was gonna do whatever I gotta do to try to keep it patched together and make it happen."

This situation created quite a bit of friction, to the point where Brady and Belichick basically didn't talk to each other anymore.

"And every time Coach goes to Tom [in captains meetings], there's awkward silence and tension there that you could feel. And I'm thinking to myself, dang let me slide back I don't want to get in the crossfire," Matthew Slater said. "I remember times like if Tom wanted something done, he would tell me to go tell Bill. And I'm looking at Tom like, 'Tom, I'm not telling Bill. You tell Bill."

Kraft had a similar recollection of the relationship.

"Basically it was a silent relationship. Before, there had been tension. But now it was just totally dysfunctional," Kraft said of Brady and Belichick.

And while Brady didn't want to explore the negative memories too much, he did admit, "We just didn't talk a lot."

As for the reason for this silent relationship, Kraft believed Belichick saw the quarterback as a threat to his power.

"Tommy is the greatest in the 100-year history of the game, and I think he represented a threat to Bill's full power. He didn't want Tommy there," Kraft said.

That may well be the strongest quote to come out of this entire series.

For Belichick's part, all we got was this from him: "For a head coach, all the relationships are very important. It starts at the top with ownership, and it can derail some positive and constructive progress if those things don't work out well."

Belichick Still Has Trouble Praising Brady

We saw in the NFL 100 program that Belichick and Brady have tremendous mutual respect for each other. It's obvious.

At the same time, to this day, Belichick still has a hard time praising Brady.

When asked the simple question of what Brady did well in his 505-yard performance against the Eagles in Super Bowl LII, Belichick didn't answer.

"Yeah, I mean, offensively, they … they scored more points than we did," Belichick said. "So give their staff and players credit."

Belichick's interview comments for this series were weird. That may have been the weirdest.

Danny Amendola Zinged Bill Belichick Pretty Hard

Everybody knows that when Bill Belichick sees a poor play in a film session, he'll tell the team that he can get someone from Foxboro High School who can do their job better than whichever Patriots player screwed up.

Well, as a player whose perspective led him to believe Bill Belichick was eager to move on from Tom Brady, receiver Danny Amendola had a thought.

"I could've got the kid from Foxboro High School to tell you that you shouldn't have let Tom Brady go," Amendola said.

That quip was played before a montage of the Patriots missing the playoffs in 2020, Jakobi Meyers throwing the ill-conceived lateral to Chandler Jones in 2022, and of Scott Zolak saying "this might be one of the dumbest teams I've ever seen." Kraft is then asked if he has any regrets about how it all ended.

"Sure. I would've liked to have seen the seventh Super Bowl as a Patriot," he said.

Belichick's Brilliant Game Plan Vs. Rams Ensured He'd Keep His Job

According to Robert Kraft, Bill Belichick was kept under a watchful eye after the Malcolm Butler benching. Yet the Patriots' defensive game plan and performance in the Super Bowl the following year secured his job for the foreseeable future.

"And so when you come to the decision, you know, Brady or Belichick, I thought back to the Eagles Super Bowl. Tommy threw over 500 yards but Bill made a tremendous error. I credited Bill with that loss. To be honest, my head coach is a pain in the tush. But I was willing to put up with it as long as we won. So for the next Super Bowl, I wanted to keep an eye on him," Kraft said. "After winning that Super Bowl, I thought what an amazing defensive job our staff did under the leadership of Bill. So if I ever thought that Bill was losing it as a head coach and couldn't perform, he had reestablished himself. At that point, Tommy understood that Bill would be the head coach for a number of years going forward."

Regarding that game plan, Devin McCourty explained that "Bill was always finding the edge that most people wouldn't think about." In this case, Belichick determined that the Rams struggled against zone defenses. Even though the Patriots didn't really play much zone, they did in the Super Bowl.

"When you show 'em something that they've never seen, it's like, 'Whoa, where did this come from?'" McCourty said. "It totally threw them off."

The Rams averaged 32,9 points per game that season and 28 points per game in their two playoff wins. That night against New England, they scored just three points.

"It is a gutsy move, that late in the season," Matthew Slater said. "But his ability to -- kind of like a chameleon -- change to attack a weakness is really, I think, unmatched."

A mic'd up clip from the game shows Belichick saying, "I can see [Rams head coach Sean] McVay. It's definitely f------ them up, all right? Stay with that."

For anyone hoping to see Belichick get "more credit" for the success of the team in this series, the final episode certainly highlights his strategy quite well. In a lot of ways, it was a great picture of the late stage of Belichick's Patriots career, as his ability to coach a defense never seemed to get away from him. Some personal grudges and improper evaluation of the quarterback position might have ultimately brought the team down over the final four years, but the coaching was still there.

Despite all of that, there was a nice moment captured after the Patriots beat the Rams.

"Hey, congrats man," Brady said to Belichick in the immediate aftermath of the win, with the red, white and blue confetti starting to fall.

"Yeah, I love you," Belichick said to Brady.

"Way to go," Brady replied. "I love you, too, man."

It's kind of funny, because for as much as the issues between Belichick and Brady were very real, that's probably how the two of them will choose to remember their relationship.

The End

There's always been this weird resignation in New England that Tom Brady just had to leave after the 2019 season, that the roster wasn't any good anyway, and that the time had simply come for Brady and Belichick to split. Some of us have always found this to be an odd acceptance of the state of affairs, as the Patriots -- who were Super Bowl contenders for the better part of 20 years -- certainly could have continued building contenders.

Regardless, that resignation seems to exist among the key players in Brady actually leaving via free agency in 2020.

"I had envisioned Tom ending his career here, but storybook fairytale endings don't always happen in life," Jonathan Kraft said. "It wasn't what I personally wanted. I know it wasn't what my dad wanted. But it really had run its course. It was just the right decision for him."

After Brady went to Kraft's house to inform him that he was going to be leaving in free agency, they called Belichick.

"I would say that's kind of what I expected. But you know, there's always kind of the, you know, saying goodbye is always hard," Belichick said. "And you know, I loved coaching Tom, I loved having him on our football team. But at that point in time, I think he made the right and the best decision."

Belichick believing that Brady made the best decision by leaving him is a bit of a brain twister, but it's indicative of how sour the relationship had gotten.

Robert Kraft, who said he believes "strongly" that Brady would have stayed with the Patriots if Belichick was no longer the head coach, framed the whole matter as just the way life goes.

"To be honest, I didn't want to move on from either one, but the point is keeping them together for 20 years is the hardest thing I've done in my business career," Kraft said. "Nothing is perfect in this world, as much as we would like it to be. This is life, and it's what happens. And how you deal with it and how you moved on."

Tom Brady Was, Unsurprisingly, Emotional About The Whole Thing

Dating back to Tom Brady crying during "The Brady 6," we know that the man gets weepy. The fiercest and most fiery competitor is also a bit of a hippie. Life is all about balance.

So it was no surprise to see Brady choking back tears when discussing the end of his time with the Patriots.

"[Kraft] said I think we should call Bill," Brady recalled of his meeting with the owner. "And then when Bill answered, it was emotional. Just because again, that's a chapter coming to an end. And I expressed that to Bill, too." 

He added: "Life is very imperfect and relationships are imperfect, but ... I'm very proud of our journey. It was hard. But, um … but it was great."

While the ending got ugly, it's clear Brady doesn't want to remember it that way.

"In the end, you look back," an emotional Brady said. "And seeing that whole journey, you know, it's perfect. It doesn't need to be more than that."

Later, a near-teary Brady tried to put a bow on the whole thing.

"My teammates, Robert, Jonathan, their whole family, everyone I know so closely, Bill, his family … I have unbreakable bonds with those people," Brady said. "I've been through it all with them."

Even Belichick tried to put a happy spin on everything, though, well, he wasn't quite fighting off tears the way Brady was.

"I have great love, respect and appreciation for all the people that have given so much to help the team," Belichick said. "I tried to help it in my way, but we all play a part in it, and we all need each other."

When Did Brady Tap Out?

There's this one quote from Brady: "Me and Coach Belichick, you know, we did what we loved and we competed for 20 years together. But I wasn't gonna re-sign another contract, even if I wanted to play 'till 50. I knew that based on how things had gone, I wasn't gonna sign up for more of it."

Missing in this quote -- which is a whopper -- is when Brady arrived at this decision. His contract situation late in his Patriots career was a bit nutty, but the short of it is that he wanted a new deal in the summer of 2018, coming off his MVP season. Instead, he got incentives added to his contract for 2018, and he didn't hit them. He spent the summer of 2019 also wanting a new contract, making a public plea (joking, of course) to the media to tell Kraft to give him a new deal. Brady then played the 2019 season with the Patriots -- a season that doesn't get mentioned at all in this episode -- before hitting free agency in March of 2020.

At that point, Brady had obviously made the mental decision to move on from the Patriots. The previous summer, when he was seemingly looking for a two-year deal from the Patriots? That doesn't seem like the case.

As has been the case a few times in this series, the precise timing on certain elements seems fuzzy. Some clarification on that one would have been useful.

Patriots Fans Can At Least Enjoy The Ending

Much of this series, really, did not cater to Patriots fans. It wasn't really a football documentary so much as it was a drama series, one that spent much more time analyzing personal relationships, cheating scandals and Aaron Hernandez's arrest and death than it did assessing how and why the Patriots won as much as they did for so long.

At the very least, though, the series does a nice job of summing everything up over the final six-plus minutes of the finale. That includes quotes from Willie McGinest and Ernie Adams that describe what the so-called "Patriot Way" was actually all about.

From Willie McGinest:

"You've gotta have the right guys with the right mentality. Everybody's gotta buy in. Everybody's gotta be unselfish. You gotta have the core group of men who are gonna go down the same road together and battle the same way together, that will sacrifice their personal lives for what they're doing. It's uncanny, like -- it doesn't happen."

From Ernie Adams:

"Everybody wants to go to the Super Bowl. Not that many people really wanna do what it takes to get there. All the lifting weights in February, the training camp, those late nights you're sitting there, you're dog-tired but you gotta watch that extra reel of film. And then that's the stuff nobody sees. People say, 'Well, there's no fun.' But you know what, our fun, frankly, is being on that field after the Super Bowl, with the confetti pouring down, putting your fingerprints on the Lombardi Trophy. That's the fun. That's the payoff."

Brady's return to Foxboro in Week 1 of the 2023 season is documented, including his trip into Robert Kraft's office to reunite with his former boss. (A Hall of Fame-style bust of Brady's face and neck was sitting on Kraft's desk. Kraft said someone had sent it to him.) Brady's return to the field is shown, along with unedited mic'd up audio of him screaming at the crowd, and clips of Brady's "I am a Patriot for life" speech essentially bring the series home.

Storybook endings may not happen in real life, but they do in this series. Winning six Super Bowls and three more conference championships over an 18-year period while employing a historically great head coach and a historically great quarterback probably warrants that ending.

You can read a review of the ninth episode, "Breaking Point," here.