Tom Brady walked into the perfect situation last year when he signed with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. He won a Super Bowl in his first year, and the story is legendary.
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However, it always wasn’t so easy and smooth as people know it to be now. Right from the start of getting Brady on board, there was a lot of tension about whether the NFL legend would sign or not.
In the end, it all worked out, but if you were to ask Bucs GM Jason Licht about how he was feeling at the time, he would probably tell you that he was scared out of his mind. The Brady signing obviously worked out in the short run, but it looks like it might in the long run too. Brady, at age 44, leads the league in passing yards (2,275) and passing touchdowns (21). He recently became the first player to hit 600 career touchdowns.
Tom Brady had an interesting phone reply when GM Jason Licht called him
The whole process of bringing Brady on board involved a lot of phone calls. On March 16th, 2020, Jason Licht called Brady’s agent Don Yee saying, “I’m calling about Tom.”
Yee would go on, “you made the right call. You really made a good decision to call me.” Brady had been researching Bucs coach Bruce Arians and reading his book The Quarterback Whisperer, and he was really impressed by what Tampa Bay was building.
“You’ve got a good nucleus of talent at Tampa,” Yee would say to Licht, “and it’s important that the head coach, general manager, ownership, and the quarterback have the same commitment to winning.”
However, the job wasn’t done. It wouldn’t be over until a call to Brady was made. That level of intimacy is needed when you’re dealing with the greatest quarterback of all time. Licht picked up his phone on March 18th with coach Arians right next to him.
“What’s up, babe?” Brady said immediately as he picked up the phone. “Jason, this is going to be a hell of a lot of fun.” Brady then told Licht how much he loved the Bucs defense’s potential and how dominant the receiving core was.
The rest is quite literally history. It’s crazy to think how it all started with a simple “what’s up babe,” but sometimes the biggest things in sports start out in the smallest ways.
