Years removed from his playing career, Tom Brady wears many hats around the football world, most notably as Fox's top color commentator and as minority owner of the Raiders.
According to Las Vegas majority owner Mark Davis, Brady was close to joining the franchise as quarterback in 2020, after he left the Patriots. Speculation to that end began in 2021, when Brady appeared on LeBron James's HBO show The Shop and said that one of the teams he spoke to in free agency backed away late, opting to stick with another quarterback... in very stark terms.
“One of the teams, they weren’t interested at the very end,” Brady said. “I was thinking, you’re sticking with that mother------?”
UFC's Dana White poured gasoline on that fire months later, claiming that he was working to negotiate a deal to bring Brady and Rob Gronkowski to the Raiders before they ultimately signed with the Buccaneers.
Fast forward to 2025, and Brady owns a slice of Davis's team, a move that Davis confirms has its roots in previous negotiations to bring Brady in as quarterback in 2020. He also appears to confirm White's assertion that former Las Vegas coach Jon Gruden and general manager Mike Mayock nixed the deal, opting to stick with Raiders veteran Derek Carr.
“[Brady] was supposed to be here in 2020,” Davis told Raiders content creator (and former NBA star) Baron Davis. “That’s when our relationship started, was in 2020 when he was a free agent and we talked to him about coming here to play quarterback. And obviously, it was a tough decision for him, he was close to coming here, but the head coach and general manager decided they wanted to go in a different direction. So, we didn’t sign him, but as I got to know him through that process, I let his agent know that when he was done playing, I would like him to be a part of our organization.”
On one hand, it is a bit refreshing to see an NFL owner rely on his football people to make a football decision. However, Gruden and Mayock really flubbed this one. While Brady was underwhelming in 2019, his final season with New England, he put in three impressive seasons with Tampa Bay, winning the Super Bowl at the end of his first year with the team. Carr, meanwhile, went 24–24 during that stretch and the Raiders lost their only playoff appearance during that stretch.
Now, Carr is retired following a rough two-year stint with the Saints. Gruden is embroiled in a legal battle with the NFL after resigning from Las Vegas following the release of emails he sent containing racist, misogynstic and anti-LGBTQ language. And Mayock was fired at the end of the 2022 season.
The Raiders were almost certainly not as well set up to make a run at the Super Bowl as a talented Buccaneers team in need of a steady hand at quarterback, but as Las Vegas once again turns the page with veteran coach Pete Carroll now taking over on the sideline, it is hard not to imagine what might have been.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Mark Davis Confirms That Tom Brady Was 'Supposed to Be' Raiders QB in 2020 .
