_“Hey Lavonte, it took me a few years but I think I figured out your poker face.”_
Bucs fans were sweating right down to the last moment when Bucs icon Lavonte David decided to return for the 2025 season. So what were Bucs coaches thinking?
Yesterday when the Bucs made newly-signed edge rusher Haason Reddick available to speak, outside linebackers coach Larry Foote was hanging around. Foote took some time to chat with a few of the local pen and mic club.
Joe asked Foote how concerned he was that David might retire and what the vibe was with the rest of the Bucs coaches concerning David.
Foote said in recent seasons, David was playing very coy with Bucs defensive coaches, including this offseason.
> “The last three years he had a poker face,” Foote said. “I’d try to squeeze it out of him and he’d be laughing. He’d say, ‘I will let you know.’
>
> “The last three years I had no idea. But I kind of had \[a hunch this winter\].”
So what was Foote’s hunch? He knew David was getting close to a standard set by Bucs Hall of Fame linebacker Derrick Brooks. Foote thought the mark was regular-season games played. Foote believed David could break that this year.
Well, Joe looked it up. Brooks played 224 games for the Bucs. David 198. So David would have to play through the 2026 season to snap Brooks’ record for games played by a Bucs linebacker.
Ronde Barber holds the franchise record with 241 regular season games played. For David to break that, he’d have to play 44 more games. That would mean David would have to play in 2027 — and hope he doesn’t miss games due to an injury.
David playing through 2027 without missing games due to injury seems a bridge too far for Joe.
Apparently, per Foote, David would consider it a high honor to be mentioned in the same sentence as Brooks, or to have a franchise mark better than Brooks.
> “When I knew that, I said, ‘Oh, yeah. He’s coming back.'”
Joe remembers last year, it appeared that Foote thought David was gone. Joe remembers Foote congratulating David on Instagram for a fantastic career, wishing David success in his after-football goal of starting a ministry.
Instead, David had an ace up his sleeve on Foote and returned.