Former Bucs assistant GM John Spytek.

There have been some articles published lately from people who seem to suggest that former Bucs assistant general manager John Spytek was the brains behind the Bucs’ building, arguably one of the better drafting front offices in the NFL.

This made some wonder if the front office may collapse since Spytek got a gig working for Tom Brady running the show in Las Vegas.

Spytek did a sitdown with Ari Meirov of The 33rd Team and while Meirov had a glowing introduction of Spytek and his work with the Bucs, Spytek made it clear he was one of a group who turned Tampa Bay around by largely building through the draft.

“It was a lot of hard work led by Jason Licht, and all of our scouts,” Spytek said. “When I got there in 2016, we won nine games, and then we hit a little bit of a rough patch, and we had to be pretty self-critical of the players that we were selecting and signing for agency and understand where we missed, and then have a plan to come off of that.”

That’s about the time, Licht has said, that he called his staff together and try to find out where they were missing on players — and why they were hitting on some. In short, the Bucs wanted to revamp their entire eval process.

Spytek confirmed Licht’s approach.

“We just got to a point where we all put our heads together, and we wanted to know what we want a Buccaneer to look like,” Spytek said. “What do we want these players to be that we either pay a lot of money to in free agency, or we use high draft picks on?

“We kind of found that ‘I Am That Man’ moniker that we talked about all the time. And that was led by Jason. He said all the time, ‘We don’t miss on the player, we miss on the person.’ And so we really believed in that, and we made that kind of the central piece of our scouting process.

“We were going to commit to the person. We were going to almost demand that the person that we were selecting [had] a love of football, a person that [was] competitive as hell, that you almost had to, in a sense, kill them to get them off the field. … That became paramount.”

Spytek said it’s harder than it seems. It’s easy to see a tremendous athlete make plays.

“… More complicated to find the driven, competitive, high emotionally intelligent person,” Spytek said, adding the research he did on this with the Bucs shows those types of players usually last longer in the league.

(It sounded to Joe like Spytek was talking about Devin White, the former Bucs No. 5 overall pick who Spytek signed for the Raiders this offseason, his fourth team in three years.)

“When you find that person, I think [that is] when you start hitting home runs,” Spytek said.

Spytek then admitted he likely wouldn’t be where he is today without Licht.

“I give Jason so much credit for leading us through that [change in drafting process] and empowering myself and Rob McCartney, Mike Biehl and Mike Greenberg to kind of organically work with our scouts to develop a system where we all believed in it, because we worked on it together,” Spytek said. “Then we made it come to life.”

Joe’s biggest worry about Spytek leaving is that if he has a modicum of success with in Las Vegas, every damn team is going to start to rework their draft philosophies to mirror what Licht started.

It’s like the Athletics in baseball. They started the moneyball crap, had early success with it, and then nearly every team adopted it. It’s no longer novel — and the Athletics are no longer winning.

That could happen to the Bucs. All the decent players who are great people could get picked through before the Bucs can draft them.