The Buccaneers are off to a slow start after six weeks, which has some around the league believing Tom Brady needs to make a call to his old friend Rob Gronkowski.
This isn’t the first time the Tampa Bay quarterback addressed the idea of bringing his former New England Patriots teammate to the Buccaneers. There was belief before the season Gronkowski could return at some point during the year, even though he retired in June.
Brady and Jim Gray spoke on the idea of Gronkowski back to Tampa Bay on their “Let’s Go” podcast Monday, and the reported sentiment the Bucs had before the season doesn’t appear to have changed.
“Well, generically speaking, I think you can use that excuse for a lot of people,” Brady said. “If you’re using that as an excuse for why you’re not performing well, I think you’re doing a detriment to the team because we’ve had a lot of time to plan for this. I mean, naturally, when you lose a great player — yeah, and a great personality and a great teammate — that doesn’t help the team, but at the same time, we’ve had a lot of time to prepare. And I think the guys that have been in there for us have worked really hard, and I think there’s a lot of reasons why we haven’t played to our level of expectation. And we’re gonna have to turn it around. There’s no easy way about this. This is a very hard challenge. Football is a challenging, demanding sport. You’ve got to be at your best every week, and every team is a battle and it’s a fight. And you got to ready to fight every week.”
Tampa Bay has relied upon Cameron Brate and Cade Otton at the tight end position. The former has dealt with concussions in the early part of the season, and the latter has only flashed meaningful production. Despite signing Kyle Rudolph in the offseason, the former Minnesota Vikings tight end has not been featured often in the offense.
Luckily for Brady and the Bucs, they get a Week 7 matchup against the Carolina Panthers, who traded their No. 2 wide receiver Monday.
