The Tampa Bay Buccaneers were a talented team in 2019, but they were missing a key ingredient.
Enter Tom Brady.
The 43-year-old quarterback left the New England Patriots last March to sign with a Bucs team that hadn't won more than nine games since 2010 and hadn't been to the postseason since 2007.
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Meanwhile, Brady won six Super Bowl titles over 20 years with the Patriots and missed the playoffs just once as a starter. According to wide receiver Chris Godwin, Brady carried that winning mindset to Tampa Bay, where it rubbed off on his new teammates.
“I think the biggest thing that he brought was the mentality of expecting to win over hoping to win,” Godwin said Tuesday on the Pat McAfee Show. “We’ve had a bunch of talented guys for years but could never really put it together.
"The history of the team kind of creeps into your mind. You go into games as a competitor like, ‘Yeah we can win this.’ But you’re really just hoping to win. But this year we approached every single game like, ‘We're damn sure can win this game.’ There’s no reason why we couldn’t."
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Bucs coach Bruce Arians has raved about Brady's leadership this season, and we've heard about how the QB motivated his squad ahead of a Super Bowl LV matchup against the favored Kansas City Chiefs.
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But Godwin does a good job capturing how Brady helped transform the Bucs from a historically futile franchise to a Super Bowl champion in less than a year. In New England, anything short of a Super Bowl title was a failure, and a big part of the Patriots' success was Brady (and head coach Bill Belichick) holding the team to that high standard.
In that sense, the Bucs and Brady were a perfect fit: A talented club that needed to learn how to win signing the winningest quarterback in NFL history.
"Once the playoffs hit there was no doubt in our mind that we were going to win,” Godwin added. “It was just a matter of showing everybody else."
