The Tampa Bay Bucs are in the midst of unprecedented franchise success, but how did it start?
Heading into 2025, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers have high expectations. The team is coming off of a 10-win season. In the offseason, Jason Licht and co. made sure to keep all the key cogs in position to counteract any sort of drop off. Tampa Bay kept all 11 of their starting offensive players while adding new additions to their defense— Ensuring 2025 was prepped for a step forward, rather than a regression to the mean.
Tampa Bay’s ‘mean’ has been pretty porous. While success in recent years has been plentiful, the Buccaneers are still the same organization that boasts an all-time record of 318-457-1 (The worst win percentage of any NFL franchise). The Buccaneers haven’t been flawless as of late, but the team has more than turned themselves around. It was not that long ago when the narrative of the Buccaneers being hopeless losers engulfed the entire franchise from top to bottom. Now, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers have more Super Bowl titles than the rest of the NFC South combined, they currently have tied New Orleans’ record for most consecutive NFC South championships, and they are one of just two teams with a five-year postseason streak, a Super Bowl championship, and four straight division titles. The other team in that category? The Kansas City Chiefs. Yes, Tampa has certainly come a long way.
There have been more than few faces responsible for this change, however, a few do stand out. In no particular order or ranking, the conversation’s most obvious figure— Tom Brady. Brady choosing the Bucs as his free agent destination will go down as the greatest free agent signing in league history and likely the most impactful singular moment the franchise has ever had. Brady did not single-handedly turn the Buccaneers into winners, but he has not taken a snap for the team since 2022 and his fingerprints are still littered all over organization. Brady’s ability to lead a young talented team in the right direction on the field with this play and off it through his experience was nothing short of miraculous.
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Brady was not alone in his Florida conquest because there were multiple reasons the greatest quarterback of all-time would choose the Bucs. Coming from the New England Patriots and Bill Belichick, Brady was not going to leave the closing scenes of his football career in the hands of an inexperienced, unproven leader. At the time, Bruce Arians had not won a championship as a head coach, but he was a highly respected football mind, offensive play caller, and person inside football circles.
The Buccaneers had signed him, out of retirement, a year prior to try and fix their perennially up and down quarterback Jameis Winston. In Arians’ first season with the Buccaneers, Winston was as Winston as ever— Tossing 33 touchdowns and 30 interceptions. Following the season’s final game (which fittingly ended on a Jameis Winston pick-6), Arians was very candid about his team’s quarterback situation and expressed interest in moving off the former number one overall pick. That offseason, names like Phillip Rivers and Tom Brady were bantered about, but their was genuine doubt that the down-trodden Buccaneers would have the clout to pull off a signing of that caliber. Sure enough, the Buccaneers led by Bruce Arians were not the Buccaneers of old, Tampa Bay shocked every outlet of sports media by managing to pull off the impossible. The greatest quarterback of all-time became a Tampa Bay Buccaneer.
While Arians’ offensive prowess combined with the respect of his peers gave Tom Brady a certain comfortability in selecting Tampa Bay as his new home, Brady would still need to take the field against NFL defenses and in order to score points and win games he needed players around him who could carry their weight— Introducing the man who engineered all those pieces into one perfect Super Bowl puzzle, Jason Licht.
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Jason Licht has not been perfect as the general manager for the Tampa Bay buccaneers, however, any early bumps in the road he hit have been mostly forgotten if not completely erased by his performance in recent years. Licht stacked an incredibly young and highly talented team around the greatest quarterback and leader in the history of the sport and watched magic happen. The 2020 Tampa Bay Buccaneers went on to be crowned Super Bowl champions, but Licht’s work did not stop there. Following another postseason run the next season, Tom Brady would announce his retirement— Briefly. Tom’s retirement and then subsequent unretirement, led to Bruce Arians’ retirement, forcing Jason Licht to pivot quickly. The Buccaneers promoted Todd Bowles to head coach and while the 2022 Tampa Bay Buccaneers did not look like the 2020/2021 Tampa bay buccaneers the team was once again good enough to take home another division title and secure a home playoff game.
2022 was Tom Brady’s last season, officially— After his second retirement. This meant the Buccaneers had no face. A team that had Super Bowl aspirations for three consecutive seasons had lost its head coach, its quarterback, and a few star players to go along with them. Fans and media pundits alike spent the offseason hollering that Jason Licht should tank for a quarterback and fire his head coach. Rather than rebuild, Licht simply recalibrated. The Buccaneers’ GM scooped Baker Mayfield up off of the NFL scrapheap and stood by his head coach as the new faces of Buccaneer football. Heading into the 2023 NFL season, you could have searched far and wide and you would have had an extremely difficult time locating a believer in the Todd Bowles/Baker Mayfield-led Buccaneers.
In what was arguably a Comeback Player of the Year campaign, Baker Mayfield led the 2023 Tampa Bay Bucs to another division title (Bowles’ second), keeping their reign of dominance over the NFC South intact. The Buccaneers hosted and won a home playoff game and Jason Licht watched the national media’s punching bag become his franchise quarterback.
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Two years later, Baker Mayfield has done nothing but continue to grow— He is viewed by most as a consensus top-10 quarterback. Todd Bowles’ teams have had better records each year he’s been Tampa’s head coach and he has won the NFC South every year he’s coached in it. The Buccaneers have been one of the most consistent teams in the National Football League. Just six short years ago, that was anything but the case. Credit and appreciation needs to be given to the men, on the field and off of it, who oversaw one of the most substantial turnarounds a franchise has undergone in recent memory. Brady, Arians, and Licht are not a trio that should be given credit in insolation, however, the three of them and their impact will forever be the fulcrum towards the modern day success of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
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