Buccaneers GM Jason Licht 'loves keeping receipts' from doubters

This spring, the Falcons have become the talk of the NFC South. They moved on from failed 2022 third-round pick Desmond Ridder and signed four-time Pro Bowl quarterback Kirk Cousins to a four-year, $180 million contract. Cousins, who turns 36 in August and is coming off a torn Achilles that ended his 2023 season, is being looked at as Atlanta’s missing piece.

Cousins and the Falcons, who are set to be led by new head coach (and former Bucs head coach) Raheem Morris, are currently the favorites to win the NFC South, a division Tampa Bay has won three times in a row.

Again, Jason Licht is aware of these narratives and at this point, he and his team are used to it. In a Thursday afternoon appearance on The Pat McAfee Show, Licht said as much before going on to explain his passion for keeping receipts from those who doubt the Bucs.

“We’re kind of used to it. I sometimes feel like, down here in Tampa, we’re in witness protection,” Licht said. “I don’t want to say we get s--- on, but there’s kind of a lack of respect. You can go on, like Lavonte David, I think, is a Hall of Fame-type player. He doesn’t get enough credit as he should. Mike Evans just recently started getting talked about as a future Hall of Famer. So, we’re used to it, but you kind of use it as ammo.

“It’s embedded in the DNA of this team. We’ve got a quarterback right now that’s got a huge chip on his shoulder and always will. And [he] uses that in his play style and the whole team takes after it. So, I’m excited. When I see somebody dissing us and say that we’re not gonna win it, I love keeping receipts. I hate to admit it, I do. I’m just gonna be honest. I love it. It’s a passion of mine now, it’s a pastime of my family. They shoot me texts, ‘This person said this, this, this.’ You know, it’s all in fun, but it’s been driving us.”

Jason Licht’s Bucs Truly Aren’t Strangers To Being Underdogs

Throughout their history, the Bucs have very rarely been viewed as favorites, top dogs or whatever other moniker you prefer to use. That briefly changed during the Tom Brady era, though only for a short time.

It didn’t even necessarily start when Brady arrived in 2020, as the team was just 7-5 before its run really kicked off late in the season and into the playoffs. And then, because Brady and the Bucs went on the road in each of the first three rounds of the playoffs before playing Patrick Mahomes and the defending champion Chiefs in the Super Bowl, they largely weren’t front-runners throughout that run.

Tampa Bay was really only viewed in that light during the 2021 season, after the team won Super Bowl LV. The 2021 campaign featured a franchise-best 13 wins, but it ended on a downer in the NFC Divisional Playoffs. From there, it was evident early in the 2022 season that the Bucs weren’t necessarily the same top-of-the-league team and after that, Brady retired.

The general sentiment was that the team would go back to being bottom-dwellers, and that’s where the underdog vibe of the current team really kicked into gear.

When Brady retired in February of 2023, Jason Licht, head coach Todd Bowles and everyone within the Tampa Bay organization made it clear that a rebuild wasn’t in the team’s plans.

Nationally, no one listened.

The general consensus was “No Brady, no playoffs” as far as oddsmakers and analysts were concerned. The Bucs’ win total was set at 6.5 and at one time, they had the worst odds to win the NFC South.

As a result, the story of the Bucs’ 2023 season became all about proving the doubters wrong. It helped that they were led by a quarterback in Baker Mayfield, who already plays with a permanent chip on his shoulder even without the fact that he had been written off by the league after bouncing from the Browns to the Panthers and then to the Rams in 2022.

“Not many quarterbacks would be willing to walk into the situation where you have the greatest of all time, Tom Brady, leave – and there’s no doubt about that, that he was the greatest of all time,” Licht said Thursday. “But [for] a quarterback to come in and be secure with himself and confident that he can lead this team to wins…

“And [Mayfield] circled us. You know, ‘I’m going there because I like that team and this is where I’m gonna revive my career.’ And that’s exactly what he did. Very early, he had a pretty good competition there in training camp with Kyle Trask, and then kind of separated himself there at the end and won the team over.”

Mayfield did win the team over, and there’s no doubt that his mentality impacted the rest of the players in the locker room. But there’s a case to be made that the overall mindset of the perennial-underdog Bucs trickles down from the top.

Jason Licht wasn’t shy about his view of where the team was heading into last season, even if that view didn’t align with those of the wider football world. As he now has admitted he loves to do, Licht kept some receipts from last offseason that he then pulled out when Tampa Bay surpassed its projected win total and extended its NFC-best postseason appearance streak to four.

And you can bet that he’s already created a “2024 receipts” folder that he’ll hope to refer back to next February.

Check out the whole episode of the Pat McAfee Show and his whole interview with Licht: