It’s a miracle that the Patriots were able to have any success at all over the last decade of head coach Bill Belichick running a joyless dictatorship.
Or so team owner Robert Kraft and many of quarterback Tom Brady’s close friends and family would have you believe in the final two episodes of AppleTV+’s documentary “The Dynasty: New England Patriots,” which dive into the tense final three seasons of the Brady-Belichick partnership and their ultimate split during the 2020 offseason.
The Post was granted screener’s access to review “Dynasty,” which currently has eight episodes available.
The narrative that “Brady and Belichick” grew over time into “Brady vs. Belichick” is told like never before in the finale, however.
Would Brady have remained a Patriot — instead of signing with the Buccaneers for three seasons and winning a Super Bowl — if Belichick sooner departed as head coach?
“Yes, I feel pretty strongly about that,” Kraft said. “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.”
How heroic.
The final two episodes serve as a sort of airing of grievances after being freed from the Belichick-enforced code of cliches that players abided by during his 24-year tenure producing six Super Bowl victories.
It sticks with the theme of “Dynasty,” which stands out in the genre for its candid interviews on football-taboo topics like “Spygate” and Aaron Hernandez’s criminal activity, though it still comes as a surprise to hear Belichick criticized.
Painted in earlier episodes as a schematic and motivational mastermind, Belichick unmistakably is shortchanged as the villain by the closing credits, which reveal “Kraft Dynasty LLC 2024” as the copyright holder.
While Belichick appears on camera to give his patented tight-lipped, mumbling, opaque answers to the interviewer’s questions, perhaps no one’s indictment hits harder than Brady’s.
“I wasn’t going to re-sign another contract even if I wanted to play until 50,” Brady said. “I knew that based on how things had gone, I wasn’t going to sign up for more of it.”
The tone for the Super Bowl-winning 2018 season was set the year before, as revealed in the ninth episode when teammates discuss dreading coming into the lifeless facility even as the Patriots played their way to an AFC championship and a Super Bowl 52 loss to the Eagles.
It was amplified during the offseason when Brady’s then-wife Gisele Bundchen complained “that f’n Belichick, he doesn’t treat my Tommy like a man,” Kraft said.
Winning no longer masked the tension between Brady and Belichick, teammates reveal, and go-betweens were needed due to their lack of direct communication.
And yet somehow the Patriots beat the Rams in Super Bowl 53.
“Basically it was a silent relationship,” Kraft said. “Before there had been tension, but now it was just totally dysfunctional … He represented a threat to Bill’s full power. He didn’t want Tommy there.”
Why did Kraft ultimately choose Belichick over Brady?
That question is never directly asked.
But Kraft implies that he had his doubts about Belichick putting his own interests before the team for the first time — citing the never-unexplained decision to bench top cornerback Malcolm Butler against the Eagles to the detriment of a defense that was shredded through the air by Nick Foles.
“I credited Bill with that loss,” Kraft said. “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.”
It all changed when Belichick out-schemed Rams head coach Sean McVay by implementing a new zone defense.
And it became clear to Brady then that Belichick was not going anywhere.
While the final season of Brady-Belichick — which ended with a loss in the 2019 Wild Card playoffs — entirely is glossed over in favor of a more circular approach to two decades together, the re-telling of their breakup provides a poignant moment of contrast: Brady’s voice crack as he chokes back emotions, while Belichick never breaks from his normal monotonous tone that could just as easily be delivering a traffic report.
Hindsight suggests that Kraft chose wrong as Belichick went 29-38 in four seasons post-Brady, until parting ways with the Patriots in January.
Just one more chance for others to get the last laugh on their Hall of Fame coach, going as far as to use Belichick’s own insults — he once compared Brady to phantom high school quarterback “Johnny Foxborough” — against him.
“I could’ve got the kid from Foxborough High School,” receiver Danny Amendola said. “to tell you that you shouldn’t let Tom Brady go.”