Will the Tampa Bay Buccaneers bring everyone back in 2021?
Would you franchise tag Chris Godwin, Shaq Barrett or Lavonte David this offseason? Matt Harmon, Scott Pianowski and Andy Behrens weigh the Tampa Bay Buccaneers' options on the latest Yahoo Fantasy Football Forecast.
Video Transcript
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MATT HARMON: Like we said, Brady's coming back. Bruce Arians is coming back. They're running it back. But whereas Kansas City doesn't have a ton of key free agents, Tampa Bay has a ton of guys with their contracts about to expire. Let's run it down right now. The oft-mentioned Lavonte David will be a free agent. Shaq Barrett will be a free agent.
Rob Gronkowski. Ndamukong Suh. Chris Godwin. Leonard Fournette. Antonio Brown. LeSean McCoy, two-time Super Bowl winner. [LAUGHS] He'll be a free agent this year as well. So, I mean, that's a ton of their key players.
I do think, obviously, they have a really good young core on defense with guys like Antoine Winfield, Sean Murphy-Bunting, Carlton Davis. But some of those guys will be due for extensions at some point here in the next couple of years, so you've got some future planning.
I think they'll-- it's tough. Like, who do you franchise tag out of that top three group? Because I think basically the only ones you'd think about are David, Godwin, and Barrett. You already tagged Barrett last year, so that's another consideration. But Tampa Bay is set to lose a few pieces here.
ANDY BEHRENS: I had already sort of convinced myself that it was going to Godwin until you start running down the list of players. Like how can Lavonte David--
SCOTT PIANOWSKI: Me too.
ANDY BEHRENS: --not be there? Like, until Brady-- Brady is automatically your face of the franchise, but that was, like, face of the franchise potential guy for me. So I can't imagine David not there. But, again, you can only play the-- you can only play the tag once, and you got to choose wisely.
SCOTT PIANOWSKI: It sounds like, you know, Brady has already squashed what his future is. I would never be surprised if Gronkowski walked away again.
MATT HARMON: Yeah.
SCOTT PIANOWSKI: You know, this is a guy who already retired for a solid year, who, you know, wants to have a second act. He plays a very physic-- every position football's physical, but, I mean, he's been beat up so much that it wouldn't surprise me if he did that. I'll say-- you know, did we miss out on the fact that-- was this a Leonard Fournette revenge game?
And the idea that he was cut by the Jacksonville Jaguars, and I'm checking on a map. Jacksonville apparently is in Florida. And he signs with a Florida team. Plays in a Super Bowl headquartered in Florida. And gets to show Jacksonville, you know, who picking-- on the clock, as we speak, you know, hoping that Trevor Lawrence is all that he's cracked up to be.
I'm really curious to see what-- we've seen, what, running backs don't get second contracts, right? Unless you are a Christian McCaffrey or an Ezekiel Elliott. And there's a lot of people who think that the Cowboys really screwed up when they gave Elliot the deal.
I'm curious to see what the market turns out to be for Fournette, who has polished off-- you know, Tampa Bay has become a little bit of a halfway house in the sense that-- not that these guys did anything wrong off the field, but, you know, Fournette had bottomed out as an NFL commodity. Antonio Brown was too hot to touch. Nobody wanted to go near him. A lot of moving pieces.
David would be the guy I would prioritize. Only in the sense that they're gonna have-- even if they lose some of this receiving talent, they're still gonna bring receiving talent back. Mike Evans is-- I don't see a major drop. I know he's at an age where we start to get nervous about receivers.
It's just-- man, don't you feel old when you see that class of 2014 start to get to the back nine of their careers? It just feels a little bit strange. But as much as I love Godwin, David would be the first guy I'm like, we got to find a way to keep him in this building.
MATT HARMON: Yeah. Maybe try to work out an extension with Godwin, too. But could they-- they also definitely want to bring back Antonio Brown, and I feel like that's a marriage that just, for better or for worse, probably needs to remain together. You know, because of the bond that Brady and Brown weirdly share.
I still don't really understand that relationship, but I don't-- I guess it's not my relationship to understand. So I could see that bringing back Brown on maybe a low cost deal. And then if Godwin hits the market, I mean, I think-- I might've said this on Thursday's show. Who the hell knows what I said last week at any point.
But if Godwin gets the market, teams are gonna throw barrels of cash at him because he's young, he does everything extremely well. You know, I was going back and forth with Robert Mays from The Athletic who wrote a great profile on Godwin last week. I'd encourage everyone to even go check it out.
The guy has no weaknesses in his game. He has no point where it's like, ah, yeah, Chris Godwin's not very good at doing that. So even if he just has two catches for nine yards in the Super Bowl, they didn't need a lot out of their passing game in this game.