Tom Brady's Retirement, Bucs Future QB Options | Bucs Insider

inside our Live to answer all of your Brady related questions. So, as always, if you have a question for us, you can head on over to the Buccaneers Facebook page and you can leave them in the comments section. We're gonna give people a little bit of time to do that. And so of course, let's just start with initial reactions to finding out that he is retiring and your thoughts on his announcement and knowing that he is no longer

going to be the leader of this Buccaneers franchise. Well, it was a little hard to be surprised, frankly, since this kind of leaked on Saturday and there was a lot of back and forth. But when you cold through everything that was being reported and what you knew and what you suspected. It did seem like that was probably going to be the case, that he was just waiting until after the weekend so as not to kind of step on the big day on Sunday of football. So

I find it got at all surprising. It's you know, it's a sad day for the franchise a little bit. It's bitter sweet. Uh. It would have been nice if he had played for one more year. Obviously was still playing at a very high level last year. But I think you can, I mean think the main emotion is

just gratitude that these two years happened at all. I mean, Jason Light and Bruce Arians decided to look what was behind door number two back in uh February and March of two thousand twenty, and they found Tom Brady there, which even two years later is almost a little hard to believe. But it happened, and so did I so did a Super Bowl championship and then the Division title and a thirteen and four record and another advancement to the Division Title game and incredible comeback in Tom Brady's

last game. It was a great ride. I wish it was going on for at least one more year. But Tom Brady has to do what is right for him, you know, That's what this is about. Yeah, and we are so thankful for the time that he gave to us and it led to a Super Bowl ring and some incredible things, and it's it was wonderful a while it lasted, and um, yeah, it is. It is bittersweet,

of course it is. It is sad, but at the same time, you know, we all knew this was gonna end at some point and now it's exciting to see the future of where the team is going to go. So again, if you're just tuning in, we are taking all of your Brady related questions on the Buccaneers Facebook

page in the comment section underneath the live video. So of course we know the vast majority of them are going to be about who's going to replace him, So first of all, let's start with the guys that are on the roster and what you think of of the three of them and what the potential is for the role they could each have moving forward. So but three year including Ryan Griffin, right, yes, yeah, which is also we can discuss the whole free agency implications of a

lot of things. Well, both Both Blaine Gabert and Ryan Griffin are do to become free agents, so the only one under contract right now is Kyle Trask. Of course, your second round pick from this past season. And I don't think you take a second round draft pick and uh don't at least have an idea that he might become your starter. I don't think the sixty four pick in the draft says this guy is definitely gonna be a long term starter, but I think it says we

think there's a shot this is going to happen. So uh, coach Arian said on Monday, I think the day after the season, when obviously there was already speculation about the possibility of Tom Brady retiring, that he was comfortable with what's on the roster. I think he primarily meant Blaine Gabbert, who he has always been very very high on, has said a lot of publicly, very strong things about Blaine.

Gabbert called him one of the more underrated players in the league at one point, and uh, you know, Kyle Trast just by virtue of the draft pick, obviously they see something in him, and he's he's got a lot of physical tools. It's just that we didn't you and I and and the viewing public didn't really learn much about Kyle trast this year because that's what that wasn't what's the sea and was about? Uh, it was about one more shot at it with Tom Brady. And so

it's it's hard for me to say. I think Kyle Traska is definitely the quarterback of the future. I don't think the team knows that yet, but I think it's willing to find out, you know what I'm saying. But again, Bruce Arian said that door number two thing again. He said, we will be doing our homework, so, uh, we'll we'll look at all the possible options because we did that two years ago and look what we found. Yeah, I say, door number two worked out pretty well this last time.

So he says that it gives me a lot of faith. So you brought up the free agency part. So let's also, of course, it's always a lot of fun to think of it as monopoly money and whoever you can get and sign on, what all you can do. But cap implications are very important to roster building, to picking out who the quarterback is going to be. So tell us

what the Buck's current cap situation is. What losing Brady means to that what these guys that are free agents means just overall the quarterback implications on the Buccaneers cap well. The first thing to realize is that even though Tom Brady has officially said he's finished playing, the actual retirement process isn't happening today or necessarily in the next few

weeks or months. And the reason for that is there are different ways you can manipulate the timing and possibly renegotiate the contract to either you know, reduce the cap hit to some extent or push some of it off. And you could do that by not actually placing him on the retired list or releasing him until after June

twod what that would do. Right now, if you just released Tom Brady, you would get a thirty two million dollar dead cap hit, which means you'd be paying You'd be devoting thirty two million dollars on your cap to

a player who's not on the roster. You can reduce that by about twelve million by just um waiting until June two and doing it then, and then you're you're pushing the rest of that cap hit one when there it will probably be a higher cap and the Bucks might not face as many uh important free agents decisions

as they are facing right now. Also, if you could possibly look to what happened with Drew Brees last year in which the Saints and Breathes renegotiated his salary to take it down to the league minimum, which reduced the capit.

And if you're if you're Drew Brees in that situation, you're not getting that salary anyway, it doesn't hurt you to to to reduce it, right, So there could be some maneuverings with Tom and the team working together to try to reduce that cap hit, because if just straight releasing them would be troublesome for the Buccaneers, who are right now are slated to be about fifteen million dollars

under the cap. With the players they have in their contract, that's about a little under league average, but it's not great considering we have so many free agents we're going to try to resign, right And so, now, keeping that in mind, where do you see you know, Tom's replacement coming from inside the roster, draft, free agency? And how does the cap affect those different things in those different decisions, Well, yeah, the cap would be most likely to come in play.

If you're trying to go after a veteran, you could we could talk about the free agents that are supposed to be on the market right now, like a Teddy Bridgewater or Marcus Mariotta or almost humorously, Jameis Winston, which seems like it would be hard to believe, but he is one of the phrases out there and he does have, you know, a body of work. Um, Tyrod Taylor, Mitch Drobiski. I mean, these are guys that are probably gonna blow the doors off for Bucks fans right now. Um, It's

not like there's another Tom Brady right now. I think a lot of speculation you're gonna see is players that are right now under contract but maybe have some reason to not be with their team next year. So we're we're not doing anything tampering because you and I are allowed to talk about this. Obviously, you're gonna be seen a lot of things like would they go after Earn Rodgers, would they go after Russell Wilson, Things like that those

are possible. Seem a little far fetched, but that would involve quite a bit of work trying to fit him under the cap, or would definitely not be easy. The draft. It's not a great quarterback year for the draft. You've got Malik Willis out of Liberty, You've got let's see, I can't remember Kenny Pickett from Pitt Matt Ralph from Ole Miss. But I have a hard time seeing the Bucks draft another quarterback a year after they spent a

second und pick on the quarterback. I think they probably want to find out what they have in him first. So if you're staying in house and either going with some combination of Matt of Kyle Trask and maybe resigning Blayne Gabber or something like that, the cap the cap implications aren't that bad. So now also, of course, the implications of Brady retiring on the rest of the team and on these other cap decisions and all these other free age and things. So um, this is definitely gonna

make everything very interesting. You know, last year, the whole sentiment was we're bringing everybody back, We're doing it again. That take to all of that. So now knowing that Brady is retiring, what do you see as how this could affect the free agency priorities of who you bring back back, who you go after, How this could just

shuffle everything up at all the other positions on the roster. Well, the first thing to note here is that that Tom Brady contract we were just talking about, he renegotiated that last year to add the year and some avoidable years on the end in order to give the Bucks capital leaf. Last year saved us like nineteen minute dollars in CAP space and very much helped in that effort to keep

the whole band together, which the Bucks did successfully. It's not really gonna be an option this year, no matter what we do. The Brady retirement is not gonna probably not gonna be a good thing for the Cap unless they can work it out with him. As I said before renegotiating the salary, you might get a little bit of relief that way. Um, But I think what you're probably asking me more is what does Brady's departure? How does that affect all these other guys that may or

may not want to come back? And I still think there's a culture here. I still think it's a good roster. I don't think there's any reason why Chris godwindn't say or Ryan Jensen wouldn't want to come back if they can make it work. But obviously I think it would have been much more of a draw, more of an alert if Tom Brady was still here. So I can't see how the tom Brady retirement helps the books cause in terms of trying to keep a Chris Godwin or

somebody like that. But hopefully these guys feel good about this team with even without Tom Brady, and there's incentive return, and there's incentive for the Buccaneers even without Tom Brady to say, we're still contenders this year and we're gonna try to keep as much as this core intact as possible. It's going to be a very interesting next couple of months in that regard, and we're gonna get a lot

of answers about where this team is headed. All right, Well, that is going to do it for us on this special edition of Buccaneers Inside Are Live presented by Miller Lite. Thank you guys for tuning in, and of course they tuned to Buccaneers dot Com for all the coverage of what will surely be an interesting free agency period. We'll see it then,