Knee was breaking down.

We all knew Bucs iconic linebacker Lavonte David had been dealing with a bad knee that had been barking.

In fact, David had his knee cleaned out/scoped after the season. As you could tell from his retirement announcement, David is walking around just fine.

That knee had been barking for some time. Joe remembers former Bucs Super Bowl-winning coach Bucco Bruce Arians preferred to hold David out of practice when the Bucs went into the Glazer Shed as Arians said the turf was bad for David’s knee.

Thursday night, appearing on “Speakeasy,” a weeknight YouTube show hosted by former NFL linebacker Emmanuel Acho, David stated that his bad knee, as much as anything, helped make up his mind that he had played enough football.

“For the past two years, it has been on my mind,” David said of retirement. “And coming into [the 2025] season it was on my mind more than normal.”

So why did retirement weigh on David last summer? It wasn’t so much his fading skills. It was his health.

“I came into the [2025] season with a bad knee,” David said. “I actually really didn’t work out until a week before I had to report for training camp.

“So I was already behind on that. So I wasn’t in the best shape. So I had to work my way up and play through the season and try to play at a high level for my standards and my expectations.

“Throughout that, I thought, ‘Yeah, man. It’s probably time for me to hang it up and move on.’ I’m kind of cool where I am at in my career. The league did me well.”

David said the deciding factor, as he had said in previous interviews, was a lack of motivation. David said after each season, once he got back to Miami and rested for a few days, he began mapping out a plan for getting his body right to be his best self for the following season.

This year when he got home? He wasn’t organizing any plans for 2026.

“In the offseason, I’ve got to have a plan,” David explained. “I have to know what I’ve got to do, right away. But once I kind of hesitated, and I didn’t really know, that’s when I knew, ‘Yeah, it might be time to give it up.'”

What’s interesting to Joe is that David said he didn’t work out until a week before the season. But there was video on social media of David working out right before he made the announcement he was returning for the 2025 season.

Maybe the video was just for show? Maybe he was testing out his knee in the video and in the aftermath it bothered him so much that he kept off his feet?

Either way, it’s sad that an injury chased David from the game as much as anything else.