Tom Brady Recounts His 'Devastating' 2008 Super Bowl Loss in 'Dynasty': ‘I Was Like, What the F---?’ (2024)

Seventeen years after losing the 2008 Super Bowl, quarterback Tom Brady goes deep in a new episode of documentary series The Dynasty: New England Patriots about the devastating last minute loss — and much more.

In episode 5 of the Apple TV+ series, dropping today, Brady reveals, “Losing the 2008 Super Bowl was devastating. I was like…what the f---? That year, we dominated. We destroyed teams. So how did we lose? If there’s one thing in history I’d change, it’s that game. But we can’t change it. I think what you learn about football and about life is….you never have it quite mastered. It was a tough lesson for me.”

The series is a deep dive into the rise and fall of the Patriots, produced by Imagine Documentaries and directed by Matt Hamachek, who got inside access to the major players including Brady, team owner Robert Kraft, Rob Gronkowski, coach Bill Belichick and more.

“The part of the story that has always interested me is less about football and more about the human part — and that starts off Episode 5,” Hamachek tells PEOPLE. “Tom Brady comes in. It’s his first game back [in 2008] after that devastating loss. He’s hit and his knee shatters and he’s out for the rest of the season…It was the first time Tom had to confront his own football mortality. And he’s realizing that the show will go on without him and that he is expendable.”

“The other thing his coach [Belichick] knows is he has to start preparing for one day to replace Brady, even if he is the greatest quarterback of all time,” says Hamachek, who also executive produced all ten episodes of the series. “On one hand, you have the guy who says I’m going to play till I’m 45 years old and do the thing that no one else has ever done in the history of this sport at this position and a coach who is relentless in his understanding of the way things have gone — and that is the beginning of the tension in that relationship.”

As Brady, who was replaced by Matt Cassel as starting quarterback that season, says in the doc, “From the outside looking in, you realize the show still goes on. I was determined to get back to playing. Three days after the surgery, I was trying to pretend like I was superhuman.”

“I lost a lot of weight,” he continues. “I was very gray. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t move my knee, it was so swollen.”

According to Hamachek, “That’s when he starts to talk about things like, how do I not end up on the operating table again? He starts to think about things like nutrition and how he takes care of his body, all the things that we know about Tom Brady now, the avocado ice cream…”

“I think his own vulnerability really kicked in big time because he had observed over the years the modus operandi of our head coach," says Kraft in the episode. "All players are expendable.”

But not all players are Brady. “He started off in University of Michigan as the seventh string quarterback which is as far back as you can go, right?” says Hamachek. “But by senior year, that changes. And then when he gets to the NFL, he’s the 199th pick, which is one of the last picks made, so there’s always the feeling that everyone is counting him out.”

But as he made clear in the 2017 Super Bowl against the Atlanta Falcons, that would be a mistake.

“In the history of the Super Bowl, nobody has ever come back from 28 to 3. It’s curtains,” says Hamachek, who recounts a story that Scott Pioli, a former Patriots executive who then worked for the Falcons, tells about the exec's suite that night.

“Everybody on that side is saying we’re about to win the Super Bowl,” says Hamachek. “And everyone is high-fiving and Pioli says, ‘You don’t get it. That’s Freddy Krueger wearing number 12 on the other end of the sidelines. He’s going to get some of us and the only question is, is he going to get all of us and does he have enough time to do it before the clock gets to zero. And sure enough, this guy who had been doubted in his mind his entire life, walks out onto that field and mounts the greatest comeback in the history of the Super Bowl.”

From there, the growing tension between he and Belichik and “the unraveling eventually of the Patriot dynasty,” as Hamachek describes it, is explored in coming episodes. “It’s a football story but it’s what I like to call Shakespeare but with footballs.”

The Shakespearean drama continues in Episode 6, which delves into the tragedy of Aaron Hernandez, the Patriots tight end who had multiple run-ins with the law and was found guilty of first degree murder in 2015 and sentenced to life in prison. He died by suicide in 2017.

”There’s duality to the Aaron Hernandez story,” says Hamachek. “There is the tragedy and the other element is how much they loved and cared deeply for this guy. He was one of their brothers.”