Tom Brady has publicly fired back at his Tampa Bay Buccaneers successor after Baker Mayfield leveled a series of accusations at the retired quarterback.
Brady found himself in the firing line last week after Mayfield, who replace the NFL legend in Tampa Bay, took aim at his locker room presence.
The Buccaneers quarterback last week accused the serial Super Bowl winner of creating a ‘high-strung environment’ within the team he inherited in Florida and Brady didn’t take too kindly to Mayfield’s comments.
Using his new $375million Fox platform, the former-quarterback-turned-announcer took a savage swipe at Mayfield, who signed with Tampa Bay in 2023 after Brady retired.
‘I thought stressful was not having Super Bowl rings,’ Brady said while calling the Bucs’ game against the Philadelphia Eagles Sunday.
‘There was a mindset of a champion that I took to work every day. This wasn’t daycare. If I wanted to have fun, I was going to go to Disneyland with my kids.’
Brady added that he believed the best way to approach the game was to have teammates who ‘push each other outside of our comfort zone.’
‘Great teammates do that,’ he said. ‘There’s high expectations for us, we gotta make sure we go out there and deliver.’
Mayfield had claimed that he and Brady had ‘very different personalities’ with the Tampa Bay locker room now contrasting to the one Brady left behind.
‘The building was a little bit different with Tom in there. Obviously, playing-wise, Tom is different. He had everybody dialed in, high-strung environment, so I think everybody was pretty stressed out,’ Mayfield said on the Casa De Klub podcast.
‘They wanted me to come in, be myself, bring the joy back to football for guys who weren’t having as much fun.’
‘You hear some of the stories about if he didn’t like a certain play call and he didn’t like it throughout the week and they still call it in the game, there might have been a throwaway on purpose or throwing it at the running back or receiver’s feet,’ Mayfield added.
‘There’s a lot of mind games going on.’
Mayfield also mentioned how those inside Buccaneers’ headquarters are less ‘stressed out’ than they were when Brady was in the building.
Brady’s highly-competitive nature did lead to the Bucs to a Super Bowl victory in his first season in Tampa Bay after signing with the franchise in free agency in 2020.
Meanwhile, Mayfield led the team to a 9-8 record and a playoff berth in his only season with the Buccaneers, beating the Eagles in the wild-card round before losing to the Detroit Lions in the divisional playoff.
