Two years before they were teammates in New England, Tom Brady and Tim Tebow squared off twice on the field, with Brady winning each game handily.
After the first one, coming in December 2011 and at the height of Tebowmania, the two quarterbacks shared concerns about Aaron Hernandez and Brandon Spikes, who played with Tebow at the University of Florida and then with Brady on the Patriots.
“I’m trying to watch over Aaron and Brandon,” Brady says to Tebow in an NFL Films video, via the Orlando Sentinel.
“I appreciate that, too, man. They’re good guys,” Tebow says in response.
“[T]hey’re a lot to handle,” Brady adds.
While those concerns, along with Hernandez’s various red flags coming out of Gainesville, don’t project to murder, it shows that the Patriots knew or should have known that Hernandez had baggage before giving him a $12.5 million signing bonus in 2012. As Ben Volin of the Boston Globe pointed out earlier this month, Hernandez bristled when Patriots coaches and employees asked him to break free from his friends in Connecticut.
Despite those concerns, the Patriots signed him to a lucrative contract that he’ll never earn.
So while the Pats may have been “duped” when it comes to whether Hernandez would kill another person in cold blood (allegedly), the team had reason to believe that something wasn’t completely right with a guy into whose pockets the Patriots stuffed millions of dollars.