Tampa Bay Buccaneers fans will never forget the team's Super Bowl victory in 2020. A lot went into it — Tampa Bay had an excellent coaching staff and had been drafting and developing homegrown players like Mike Evans, Chris Godwin and Vita Vea for years. But there were two big acquisitions for the Buccaneers that really shifted the culture and helped kickstart a winning vibe that continues to this day.
General manager Jason Licht brought in head coach Bruce Arians and quarterback Tom Brady, and those two ended up being the catalyst that helped bring Tampa Bay its second Super Bowl title. Licht was instrumental in signing both to come to Tampa Bay, and he spoke about the process with the Tampa Bay Times' Rick Stroud on Stroud's podcast, Sports Day Tampa Bay.
The first domino was Arians. Licht explained that Arians had just covered the Bucs in preseason the year that head coach Dirk Koetter got fired, and that Arians had told him that he enjoyed broadcasting — but somewhere around the NFL owners meeting, he began to get the idea that Arians would be willing to come out of retirement.
"I remember seeing an article on nfl.com about the Browns job or something," Licht told Stroud. "It was, would you be interested in coaching? He said, 'hell yeah, if it's the right place.' So I texted him, I said, would you be interested? And he said, with you, hell yeah.”
Arians took over in 2019 with quarterback Jameis Winston, but the Buccaneers would go 7-9 and fail to make to playoffs behind a season where Winston threw 30 interceptions. Once current Buccaneer Deion Jones picked off Winston's last pass of that season in overtime as a member of the Atlanta Falcons, Licht and Arians knew they needed another quarterback.
Licht and his team set to work, with Licht, Spytek and assistant general manager Mike Greenberg undergoing an operation they called Shoeless Joe Jackson — to sign Tom Brady and bring him to Tampa Bay. Licht believed it was going well, but as he explained to Stroud, free agency rules didn't allow the Buccaneers to talk to Brady or his agent while he was technically with the New England Patriots.
As a result, Licht and his team had to hear it from outside sources.
“It just started becoming a little bit more clearer and clearer through that. Now you can't talk to him — you really can't talk to the agent. But you're getting the signs and you're hearing reports in the media that the Bucs are really a probable destination, and you know that's coming from [Brady]," Licht said. "But there were a lot of "this may happen" moments, but until the final call that Tom called me, and I was over at Bruce's house when he was able to call me. That was a moment I'll never forget.”
The rest, as they say, is history. The Buccaneers won Super Bowl 55, and Brady and Arians cemented themselves as franchise legends.
