After the Tampa Bay Buccaneers signed Tom Brady and traded seemingly retired tight end Rob Gronkowski from the New England Patriots, the South Florida team was in a win-win situation. No matter how the upcoming season ends, the Tampa Bay are sure to be one of the most talked about and popular teams in the NFL. And it’s quite an amazing resurgence, given the state the franchise has been in for the last decade.
Of all the possible destinations of free agent Tom Brady’s travels, Tampa Bay seemed the strangest at first glance. In the popular American sitcom Happy Ending, there is a rather revealing scene when a young man scolds his girlfriend for buying an apartment in Tom Brady’s new city: “Damn, now we have to go to Tampa every week. Don’t you understand that Tampa is not a place where you go with pleasure? They go to Tampa to die.” This highly dubious reprise is a logical continuation of many memes and other popular American folklore, which was usually ruthless to this Florida outback. In a football sense, such trolling would also be very appropriate in the final years of the Buccaneers franchise.
For the past decade, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the New England Patriots have been at opposite poles of the NFL’s planet, about as far apart as the humble Valladolid and the mighty Barcelona of American football’s distant European cousin. The Patriots, led by Brady, became the center of the NFL universe during this period, rewriting every conceivable and unthinkable standard of greatness both within the NFL itself and in professional sports in general.
Since 2003, the Patriots have made the playoffs every season Brady has played as the starting quarterback. During this period, there was not a single season that was not influenced to one degree or another by the team of Bill Belichick. Well, let’s compare this piece of tournament glory to the results of the Buccaneers, who have now gone 12 consecutive years without a playoff – the second most in NFL history. The last season the Buccaneers took seriously was the 2001 season, which eventually ended with Tampa Bay winning the 2002 Super Bowl. The irony is that the season following the Tampa championship just became the last unsuccessful season for the Patriots with a healthy Tom Brady – the Patriots then did not get into the postseason, having 9 wins and 7 losses in their assets. From that moment on, the Buccaneers did not indulge their fans with even remote hopes for some kind of tournament claims. In fact, the most exciting thing Tampa Bay fans have been doing lately has been reeling off some of the most mind-blowing interceptions thrown by the dimwitted Jameis Winston.
Tampa Bay for many years (just during the period that Brady reigned) entrenched in the NFL as the hero Macaulay Culkin from the popular comedy Home Alone, which the whole family constantly forgot about. The only difference was that when the Buccaneers were remembered in the football family, no one cared about them anyway. But suddenly this year everything changed. Tom Brady himself came to Florida, and he will certainly do everything to ensure that the Buccaneers are finally remembered. The paradox is that Tampa Bay is now truly the right team for Tom Brady, with a roster and coaching staff perfect for the most decorated quarterback in NFL history. However, the road to this peak consisted entirely of potholes and potholes.
The modern iteration of the Buccaneers dates back to around 2014, when general manager Jason Light joined the team. He inherited an organization that was falling apart from within. In the 2013 season, the Bucks posted a record of 4 wins and 12 losses, and by October of that season, a real revolution was brewing in the team’s locker room against head coach Greg Schiano. “What is the situation here? Well, even worse than you might imagine. It’s like we are in Cuba now, ”one of the players of the then Tampa team shared his impressions with reporters.
Head coach Shiano’s old-school brutal team management methods, his more than strange attitude towards starting quarterback Josh Freeman, and the strange coach’s maniacal desire to see unquestioning, almost blind obedience from his wards set not only Tampa players, but many people around the NFL against him. . The situation was further complicated by the Staphylococcus aureus epidemic that raged in Florida in 2013. Several highly paid players at once, such as guard Carl Nix and kicker Lawrence Tynes, were infected and subsequently sued the franchise, accusing the team of the poor quality of the club infrastructure. In general, the quite logical end of a chronically ill NFL team was approaching.
Following Schiano’s dismissal, the Glazer family, who have owned the team since 1995, appointed former Chicago Bears coach Lavie Smith as head coach. As often happens, the franchise has replaced one extreme coach with another. Smith was the exact opposite of his predecessor – the new Bucks coach was a gentle and pleasant person, completely focused on his players. In Chicago, he managed to build an excellent atmosphere of mutual trust in the team. Light joined the team three weeks later, and his tandem with a new head coach should mark a new era for the Buccaneers franchise, which had by then become an outright mockery in the mouths of the entire NFL. However, something soon went wrong again.
Smith’s arrival to Tampa was initially compared to the Kansas City Chiefs’ decision to appoint Andy Reid as head coach in 2013, a specialist who has proven himself to be a man who can win with his teams, and his departure from the Philadelphia Eagles was just a consequence of accumulated fatigue over 13 years of marriage. However, while Andy Reid was able to change his formations and ideas about the game over time and with the development of the entire league as a whole, Lavi Smith’s teams often looked ill-prepared and under-trained in many ways. In terms of offense, Tampa Bay has been able to develop its game, especially since Jameis Winston, the first overall pick in the 2015 draft, appeared in the roster. But defensively, the Bucks looked terrible. ranked 26th in the league in points conceded and among the worst teams in the NFL on a number of other statistical metrics. Opponents quickly figured out Smith’s zone defense schemes and methodically destroyed the team. Smith was fired after just two seasons, and the franchise had to do another restart.
One of the main reasons for parting with Smith was also the desire of the team’s management to retain attack coordinator Dirk Cutter, who believed that he was ripe for independent work as a head coach and had offers from other teams. In his rookie season as offensive coordinator in 2015, Tampa Bay jumped from last place among all teams in the NFL to 17th in a special metric that measures yards passing based on down, fielding position, and opposition defense. against passing and running play (DVOA metric). The arrival of Winston was the defining factor for such progress, and the franchise obviously did not want to slow down the progress of its star quarterback due to the possible departure of Cutter. Nine days after Smith’s unexpected firing, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers announced the appointment of Cutter as the team’s head coach. “I think that any quarterback coordinator or coach in this role, especially with a quarterback like Jamis, has a chance of success, this is a very important and strong union of coach and team leader,” Light reasoned at the time of Cutter’s appointment.
The partnership between Winston and Cutter will define the franchise for the next few years. Maneuvering to keep Cutter on the team and even raise his profile for the sake of Winston’s progress, Light and the Glazers made the fate of their head coach absolutely dependent on the performance of their young quarterback. Unfortunately, this link quickly ceased to progress. During his five seasons with the Buccaneers, Winston had excellent stretches in which Tampa Bay proved to be a team with an incredibly explosive offense. However, these periods of enlightenment were constantly overshadowed by the terrifying interceptions that Winston threw to the amusement of the whole world, and frankly disastrous matches regularly practiced by Jamis.
Even though Winston and a very talented group of receiving players, including Mike Evans, Chris Godwin, Deshawn Jackson and OJ Howard, were extremely prolific in terms of scoring, endless losses kept the Bucks out of the top 10 NFL teams by DVOA metric, which is highly valued by pundits in the league. With Tampa’s defense still a pitiful sight under Cutter, it’s no surprise that the coach was fired after the 2018 season, when the team won just 5 games and 11 losses. The Bucks found themselves in a situation where Winston’s nanny coach left the team, and Jamis himself entered the fifth and final year of his rookie contract. In fact, everything was ready again in order to start launching the franchise from scratch.
The first saplings of the new pirate tree in Tampa were planted in early 2019, when the front office managed to convince the seemingly retired Bruce Ariens to return to an active career in the NFL. Ariens, who had even written a book called The Quarterback Tamer, had a well-established reputation as a specialist who loves and knows how to sculpt the required end product from the “passing” material. The idea of the leadership of the team was that if Ariens and offensive coordinator Byron Leftwich did not manage to mold something edible from Winston in a year, then they would simply get rid of the odd quarterback. In fact, after an insane season of 33 touchdowns and 30 interceptions that did a great job showing Winston’s strengths and weaknesses, Tampa Bay waved goodbye to him.
The topic of how Brady will fit into Ariens vertical football will remain hotly debated for the next few months, but the six-time Super Bowl winner probably knows best what game concept the Buccaneers will be most successful with. “We are very much looking forward to seeing how he will influence our line of attack. He will definitely make the guys better, that’s the hallmark of all great players. He certainly has a lot of good ideas, so we look forward to his opinion, “- enthusiastically says Bucks quarterback coach Clyde Christensen.
Mutual understanding plays a key role in the relationship between Ariens and his quarterbacks. With the Arizona Cardinals, Ariens outsourced almost all of his work to his assistants Harold Goodwin (now one of the Bucks’ offensive line coaches) and Freddie Kitchens during the weekly cycle between game weeks. However, on the eve of the game, Ariens took the reins into his own hands, and meticulously went through every fragment of the plan for the upcoming game with Carson Palmer, listening and taking into account the opinion of the quarterback. This way of preparing for games gives the quarterback a sense of complete ownership of the game plan and gives the playmaker much more confidence in the schemes Ariens comes up with. Ariens carried this ritual of preparation for games throughout his coaching career and used it with success in collaboration with Palmer, Peyton Manning, Ben Roethlisberger and Andrew Lack. Brady will be added to the list this season.
This way of getting feedback from their QBs shows very well how Ariens interacts with them in general. Unlike Bill Belichick, who fundamentally kept his distance from all his players so that he could then coolly decide on their future, Ariens was never afraid to get close to the players (for example, play golf or have a glass of beer on the day off). Yes, of course, the atmosphere of unquestioning obedience and the most severe demands of Belichick gave a grandiose result, but now it is no secret that Belichick’s methods of work annoyed and continue to annoy many players. Brady has left the territory of boredom and plunged into an atmosphere of jokes and easy communication, in which the big guy from the online has jokes about the ass on social networks. Such a change of scenery will inspire anyone.
It should always be a pleasure to play under a guy like Ariens, and the Bucks coaching staff goes to great lengths to cultivate a laid-back and relaxed atmosphere among the players. As with Cutter, Tampa’s offensive line in 2019 was very powerful but fell victim to Winston’s insane instability. But there was a real problem with the defense. Under former defensive coordinator Mike Smith, the Bucks’ defensive redoubts seemed passive and predictable, watching blankly as they were torn to bits by the offensive lines of just about every NFL team. In 2017 and 2018, on many professional metrics, the Buccaneers’ defense was firmly in last place. However, with the new defensive coordinator Todd Boles, who has an aggressive defensive style with heavy use of blitz, The Buccaneers dramatically improved their defensive stats. It looks like the bits and pieces of a successful franchise that Bucks general manager Jason Light has worked so hard to put together over the years are finally starting to come together.
Even before Brady arrived, the Buccaneers by and large already had the perfect ingredients to make the playoffs. Entering the 2020 offseason, Tampa Bay’s roster didn’t have many gaps, which was surprising for the team’s front office given a decade of unending nightmare.
Light’s years of service have been marred periodically by wild acquisitions in the free agency market. During Light’s debut offseason, the franchise signed free agents Michael Johnson, Anthony Collins, and Alterraun Werner to heavy-duty contracts, as well as quarterback Josh McCone to a two-year, $10 million, starter contract. Taken together, this influx of mediocre players has every chance of being voted the worst class of free agents on a single team in NFL history. Collins, Johnson and McCone were dropped from the team exactly one year later, and Werner was pulled from the squad after he fell out of favor with then head coach Lavi Smith.
Two years later, Light was once again remembered for his horrendous managerial decision when he traded his way up the draft in the second round to pick kicker (!!!) Roberto Aguayo. The former Florida State star missed 9 of 31 tries in his NFL rookie season and was waived from the team the following August. It would be nice if it was just an embarrassment with Aguayo… However, Light made a couple more bad decisions in the draft – 2016 first-round draft pick Vernon Hargreaves was waived from the team in the middle of his fourth season with the Bucks. And second-round defensive end Noah Spence disappeared from the team roster last August.
Tampa Bay was particularly unlucky with pass rushers and defensive backs. Between 2006 and 2017, none of the defensive ends managed to hit more than 9 sacks in a single season. Michael Bennett came closest to ten sacks in a season with 9.0 sacks in 2012. And how did the front office react to it? Right! The player has been expelled.
Selected in the first round of the 2011 draft, Adrian Claiborne boasts an excellent career in the NFL in several teams at once, but it was in Tampa Bay, which drafted him, that his game did not work out. Later, the Bucks drafted Noah Spence, signed a bunch of dubious free agents, and this position in the team’s defense continued to be frankly weak. True, the quality of the performers in the secondari zone was not much better. The coaches tried many options, from Hargreaves and Chris Conte to the experienced Brent Grimes and T.J. Ward, but none of the players managed to hide the obvious coaching miscalculations in the Bucks defensive formations. Basically, whatever Jason Light tried to come up with, those two defensive positions just decimated the Buccaneers for years on end. That’s why the 2019 off-season has been so energizing for the franchise.
The signing of Shaquille Barrett to a one-year, $5 million deal didn’t initially attract much attention, but it’s now clear that the deal is purporting to be the Buccaneers’ biggest breeding hit last offseason. The former Denver Broncos pass rusher led the NFL in sacks last season (19.5) and became a star in Tampa. Come to think of it, after just one season with the Bucks, Barrett has climbed to 18th in sacks in franchise history. He is still 14 sacks short of breaking into the top 5 in this metric. Signing a guy like Barrett for what is essentially ludicrous money is Jason Light’s unbelievable stroke of luck, which until then had bypassed the general manager, and indeed the entire team, by the side.
No less sunny is now the future in secondaries. Light was very aggressive in both the 2018 and 2019 drafts, picking up five defensive backs in the second and third rounds of those two drafts. The calculation was that, simply according to the theory of probability, one of these guys would be of the appropriate level, and Todd Bowles would help the guys progress rapidly and adapt to the speeds of professional football.
It looks like this plan worked. The youth in Jamil Dean, Carlton Davis and Shaun Murphy-Bunting quickly developed and they soon became solid starters, finally solving years of franchise problems in this area of defensive formations.
By bolstering a defense that has long been the subject of league-wide derision, the Buccaneers have gained a roster that almost any NFL team would now envy. Evans and Godwin make arguably the best wide receiver duo in pro football, and now they’ve been reinforced by a triumvirate of tight ends: OJ Howard, Cameron Breit and Rob Gronkowski. The O-line, which was rather weak in Winston’s time, has been transformed into a high-quality and worthy brigade. The D-line, in addition to the mentioned Barrett, is saturated with quality guys in the form of tackles Vita Weah and Endamukon Su, who is still a serious fighting unit, albeit at the end of his career. Behind them, we’ll find one of the league’s most underrated linebackers, Lavonte David, and first-round pick Devin White,
Of course, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers are hardly the iconic franchise during Jason Light’s tenure, but in the past two years, the front office has managed to make revolutionary changes that have made the team a worthy place for the arrival of truly star players. Now the question is very simple – can the Buccaneers justify all the advances given to them with Brady on the field?
After the Bucks took tackle Tristan Wirfs in the first round of the draft on-line and safety Antoine Winfield Jr. in the second round, there were almost no weak spots left on paper in the team’s roster. However, building a truly competitive squad requires more than just having stellar quality players on the roster. Keeping Barrett with a franchise tag was a wise decision given the front office needs time to decide on a long-term contract. The problem is, Barrett has never had that kind of sacking and quarterback pressure before the Buccaneers, and the franchise needs another year to see if Barrett can consistently put out seasons like this. Another important nuance here is that if last season Barret cost the team $5 million, then according to the “club label” it will cost the organization $15. 8 million. The on-line will certainly give Brady the best of both worlds, but all these seasoned guys are playing on expensive contracts. Light managed to restructure Jason Pierre-Paul’s contract this offseason, but he will still cost the Bucks $12.5 million this year. Mike Evans is an NFL superstar and his salary lives up to that status – a whopping $18.4 million for the 2020 season. Chris Godwin is still playing on the cheapest possible rookie contract, but 2020 will be his last year on such a contract. and his salary lives up to that status – a whopping $18.4 million for the 2020 season. Chris Godwin is still playing on the cheapest possible rookie contract, but 2020 will be his last year on such a contract. and his salary lives up to that status – a whopping $18.4 million for the 2020 season. Chris Godwin is still playing on the cheapest possible rookie contract, but 2020 will be his last year on such a contract.
The signing of the 42-year-old quarterback, the most decorated player in league history, means the Buccaneers have realized that they are finally ready to go. For the first time in the Jason Light years, the franchise was able to rent a great plane with a trained crew, fly to the right height, and buy a first-class parachute. Now the matter is small – the parachute should open.
