Perfection Only
June 15th, 2026
Intensity ruled.
The glory years of the Buccaneers offense, 2020 and 2021, were marked by true football brilliance, explained one key team member last week.
Joe heard these gems from Leonard “Playoff Lenny” Fournette and had to share. Fournette hopped on The Colin Cowherd Podcast and explained how intense Tom Brady was when it came to demanding perfection from the Bucs offense.
And the team delivered late in the 2020 season.
“I always tell people — to play in the offense with Tom, you have to be smart. Because you’ve got to think about this, every week we’re changing. We’ve got 20 to 30 hand signs we change on a Saturday that we have to know on Sunday,” Fournette said. “So if you’re not writing this down, you’re not understanding this, He will not throw your ass the ball.
“So you might as well just cancel Christmas. You will not get the ball. He doesn’t trust you to process information on Saturday and come back Sunday to carry it out. That’s what kind of made us unique.”
Asked about the Bucs’ two weeks to prepare for the Chiefs in the Super Bowl of January 2021, Fournette noted how the team was flappable and completely locked in.
“We didn’t have one mental error in two weeks. Not one mental error. Nobody made a mistake in two weeks.” Fournette said of the offense in practice.
He noted, of course, how coaches tracked mental errors daily and came up empty.
Hearing all this made Joe wonder how many mental errors were creeping into practices late last season. How much had the Tom Brady Effect worn off? And can the remnants of that team help Baker Mayfield recapture that standard?
June 15th, 2026 at 2:04 pm
It’s what a true leader does.
June 15th, 2026 at 2:09 pm
“I thought stressful was not having Super Bowl rings,” Brady said. “There was a mindset of a champion that I took to work every day. This wasn’t day care. If I wanted to have fun, I was gonna go to Disneyland with my kids.”
June 15th, 2026 at 2:09 pm
Thank you, Tom Brady. And Gronk, too. It was great.
June 15th, 2026 at 2:09 pm
BA kept an accountability sheet. The current head clown seems to promote the same mistakes
June 15th, 2026 at 2:11 pm
“Hearing all this made Joe wonder how many mental errors were creeping into practices late last season.”
Answer: Clearly a geometric amount of mental errors, blunders, miscues, flubs, gaffes, snafus, bloopers, foul-ups, miscomprehensions, etc, etc, etc……
“Just gotta get betta!!!!!” – Toad Bowels
June 15th, 2026 at 2:18 pm
makes you wonder if mental errors were glossed over during practice in 2026
GO BUCS!!!
June 15th, 2026 at 2:29 pm
“how many mental errors were creeping into practices late last season”. Well, as far as I could tell, it was the in game mental errors that were killing us. Just like Coach Bowles and Mayfield kept telling us. Game after game after game. 9 times. It was brutal. Next to his uber talented arm, Tom Brady’s biggest asset was winning football games. He learned early on that mental mistakes get you beat.
June 15th, 2026 at 2:31 pm
BA kept the accountability sheet and famously said if you show up on it more tha. Once, you either don’t give a sh!t or you’re stupid, and either way you won’t be on the team.
Todd seems to promote repeated mistakes. Every. Game.
June 15th, 2026 at 3:09 pm
Well Joe judging by the mistakes made during the game, my guess there were few if any plays that did not have mistakes. It was very clear watching the game on Sunday that players on defense especially were at times totally lost .
June 15th, 2026 at 3:26 pm
BA said Either you don’t give a $hit or you are too dumb to play here.
June 15th, 2026 at 5:21 pm
Hey Joe, the word you’re looking for is unflappable
June 15th, 2026 at 5:54 pm
If we are hoping Baker is going to do anything like Brady that’s just sad comedy. Think of this all of you that want to throw a trillion at Baker – he would be a backup QB on his team if Brady were still here, and it wouldn’t be close.
June 15th, 2026 at 6:24 pm
Baker has a better playoff passer rating than Brady – which clearly shows he’s the superior QB.
June 15th, 2026 at 6:56 pm
That 2021 season, when ME13, AB, CG and Gronk were all on the field we never lost a game.
June 15th, 2026 at 7:25 pm
You know a couple weeks back when Lavonte admitted he was slacking, there were plenty more, enough to ruin the last half of the season. They were a broken unit.
June 15th, 2026 at 9:39 pm
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Leonard, I totally believe all of that. Great musings of perfection from a rose colored memory. There were plenty of missed plays by the offense during the Superbowl. The defense won that game. If Kansas City would have come anywhere near their 30 point per game average that they had that season, the game’s outcome might have been a whole lot different.
June 15th, 2026 at 10:54 pm
Wait. Floormatt assures us that Baker is better than Mahomes, it’s only logical with that kind of thinking that Baker is also better than Brady.