Tom Brady couldn’t be happier to be getting the band back together in Tampa Bay.
Tampa Bay has become TOMpa Bay, and the Buccaneers have become the Patriots.
After adding Rob Gronkowski to their roster, the Buccaneers have done what other teams have attempted to do in replicating the blueprint for success known as The Patriot Way. While a key ingredient is still missing, the Bucs are less a Patriots cover band and more a side project featuring the core talent.
Tom Brady reacted to the news on his Instagram account, reposting a repost of an old video featuring himself and Gronk strutting to the tune of ‘Bad Boys for Life’.
How he reacted really isn’t important, it’s the fact that he reacted so quickly that matters. Brady coming to Tampa was a calculated move, one that clearly didn’t end with the ink drying on his contract. Since joining the Bucs, Tampa Bay has upgraded its uniforms and become the talk of the NFL in a way it’s never been before.
Even when the Bucs were a nationally recognized team in the late 90s and early-00s, it was their brooding defense that garnered all of the attention. Now the Buccaneers are an offensive powder keg, and all eyes are on them to see what kind of explosion occurs.
This has all the makings of a storied final chapter to Tom Brady’s career. He’s joining an offense already stocked with weapons like Mike Evans and Chris Godwin — assets he sorely lacked in New England and still managed to win multiple Super Bowls. Now he adds his trusted safety net in Rob Gronkowski, who is also looking to ride off into the sunset (again, as Gronk first retired after the Patriots win in Super Bowl LIII). Brady was already motivated, and he’s only adding more fuel to that fire with the Bucs acquisition of Gronk. Any thought that he was just going to phone in this season as he cashed in his chips with the highest bidder continues to get squashed with each potential championship move the Bucs make.
Make no mistake about it, Brady is all-in and that’s music to the ears of Bucs fans longing for something good to happen to their team.
Of course, this could also all end in total failure. Brady’s move to Tampa is mostly motivated by trying to prove that he still has something left in his legendary tank, while Gronk is hardly in his prime. Couple that with the fact that they’re trying to drag a middling but talented Bucs team out of absolute obscurity and to the playoffs for the first time in over a decade and things start to look dicey.
There’s a lot more that can go wrong than can go right, but the Bucs are happily living on the razor’s edge. Brady is all in on this upcoming season with Tampa Bay and that’s already the biggest win the Bucs have had in a very long time.
Hopefully, it’s the first in a long line of them.