The rift between Brady, Belichick, and Kraft is unsurprising (and probably won’t matter at all)

On Friday morning ESPN published a report from Seth Wickersham saying that the relationship between quarterback Tom Brady, head coach Bill Belichick, and team owner Robert Kraft has deteriorated this season.

This rift, Wickersham reports, partly came about due to the team’s widely reported souring relationship with Brady’s trainer, body coach, and business partner Alex Guerrero. The report also says that Brady was influential in the team’s decision to trade away backup quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo to the San Francisco 49ers, a move that Wickersham reports was forced upon Belichick, and one that made the coach “furious.”

The Patriots got ahead of the story on Thursday night, getting word out to the team (and a reporter) that an ESPN “hit piece” was coming. Patriots fans rushed to the team’s defense on social media and local sports radio this morning, saying the story was bogus, it was just another target on their back. Channeling our befuddled president, they called the story “fake news.”

This rift isn’t fake news. Wickersham doesn’t make stories up, and he hasn’t over a long and successful career.

This feud is also unsurprising, and if I were to guess: It won’t be a big deal at all.

Successful teams don’t last forever. They can’t. Winning prolongs relationships, but it can’t sustain them forever. We’ve seen this time and time again with just about any team in sports (or like any successful group in any field), whether it’s a one-time champion or a multi-year dynasty. It’s hard to sustain success.

Why? People are human. They want recognition for greatness. When a team wins and a person contributes, he wants more. Pat Riley called it the “disease of more,” something you know about if you closely follow the NBA or have read any of the 437 Bill Simmons columns that referenced it over the last 15 years.

When a team wins, role players want bigger roles. They want the spotlight. Players grumble about not getting enough attention. People get jealous. They bitch. Coaches try to keep everyone happy, which is the surest sign that no one will be happy.

For 17 years now, Belichick has fought this disease of more by basically saying there was only one untouchable player on the roster: Tom Brady. Everyone else was expendable. He was the only non-role player, the only one whose job was secure. Want more credit? Not happy with your role? Is your name not Tom Brady? Good. You’re traded to the Jets. Enjoy it.

For 17 years, the only three people who were absolutely guaranteed to be with the Patriots every year were Belichick, Brady, and Kraft. That was it. That was the whole list.

But through all that, Brady saw how Belichick operated the team. He had to see it. Brady knew the ethos with this organization: When your time was up, it was up. There was no emotion. You were gone. Next man up.

For 17 years, Brady never had to think about any of that shit. He existed outside of it. He could, for the most part, just play.

But this year he was on the wrong side of 40 with a great backup quarterback waiting in the wings. For the first time in 17 years, he no longer could exist outside of the reality that he could be pushed aside at any moment. He had to live with it: The Fear.

As the face of the organization for that period of time, though, Brady had built up a lot of capital. He used it, according to Wickersham, to force out Garoppolo. For a while at least, the pressure wouldn’t be quite so stiff. He could, hopefully, get back to the place where he didn’t have to think about his job and just play.

Can you blame him?

Here’s the thing about all this, though: Winning is a really freaking good salve. And the Patriots are so good, the odds are that they’re going to continue to win.

Belichick may be perturbed by Guerrero pitching his ointments or whatever to his players and annoyed that the team gave up a great backup in Garoppolo, but he’ll get over it. Brady may be stressed about his role going forward and annoyed Guerrero can’t give players his oxygenated protein nuts or whatever, but he’ll play through it. Kraft will continue to be a really rich guy. He’s fine.

NFL locker rooms are cesspools of machismo and insecurity, and every successful team has endless squabbles and riffs and jealousies and all the other petty stuff you find in any large group of people forced to spend a lot of time together. You just don’t usually hear about it with the Patriots because they’re draconian with their media policy, and if anyone gets to be too big a problem they ship him out of town.

Odds are the Patriots are going to make a deep run into the playoffs, and Pats fans will take that as evidence that Wickersham’s story was fake news. That once again they will have been vindicated.

A deep playoff run won’t change the truth of Wickersham’s story, however. It will just mean that the Patriots are a really good football team.