Tampa Bay Buccaneers fans have been re-living the past recently, which is not normally done for a team with as checkered a past at this one. Not only is it the 50th anniversary of the franchise being formed in Tampa, but times have been good lately and are worth looking back on fondly.
For large stretches of their existence the Bucs have been a really tough hang, but for as bad as things have been the highs have been truly incredible.
Fans who watched the Dark Ages of the 80s and early 90s were rewarded with a Super Bowl in 2002, and history repeated itself two decades later. A truly brutal stretch in the 2010s paid off with the Bucs winning another Super Bowl in 2020, and the team hasn’t looked back since.
One key factor in that second Super Bowl was the arrival of Tom Brady. After famously leaving the Patriots, Brady came to Tampa and changed the way the team operated in more ways than one. He’s been retired for two seasons but his influence on the team remains even though he’s no longer part of the team.
MMQB points out Tom Brady’s influence on Buccaneers re-signing Chris Godwin
NFL insider Albert Breer dove into Chris Godwin’s free agency deal and pointed out that there’s a pretty clear line to be drawn between the team getting a deal done and the influence of Tom Brady that still lingers over the team.
Breer notes that while the Patriots offered Godwin a ‘blank check’, money didn’t talk the way it otherwise might have if the circumstances had been different. Rather than leave for as much as $20 million more than what he got, Godwin came back to the Bucs on a three-year, $66 million deal.
“This, of course, mirrors how Brady would work with the Buccaneers and the Patriots before them in doing deals that would make sense both for the player and the team. It wasn’t always taking less, but it was working within a framework that allowed Tampa to continue to build around the stars it had,” Breer wrote.
Brady, of course, is now in Las Vegas and had no direct impact on the deal. He’d probably have preferred Godwin signed with the Raiders instead, as would John Spytek who is now the team’s General Manager.
As Breer points out, though, it’s almost impossible to not see Brady’s fingerprints on Godwin’s decision to return. It’s not even exclusive to this deal, as Bucs fans lived through something similar last offseason when Mike Evans chose to leave money on the table to return to Tampa Bay. Baker Mayfield didn’t hold the team hostage negotiating a new deal, and neither did Antoine Winfield Jr., Lavonte David, or Tristan Wirfs.
Every key Buccaneers player has decided to return rather than leave, which isn’t something that might have been the case before Brady arrived. The culture has completely changed — and now morphed even further into its own thing — and there’s at least partial credit due to Brady’s continued influence.
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