Sportsnaut
All teams experience roster turnover from year to year. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers are no different.
Sometimes teams make changes as a result of admitting previous mistakes. Rarely do NFL general managers admit mistakes publicly.
Yet, Buccaneers GM Jason Licht apparently doesn’t care about burning bridges.
Recently, Licht admitted that he never would have selected Devin White with the fifth overall pick in the 2019 NFL Draft. This, despite White becoming a Pro Bowl linebacker and helping the Buccaneers win a Super Bowl.
“Knowing what I know now, he would have been off my board,” Licht says. “It was too much about him.”
While White started 75 of 76 games with the Buccaneers from 2019 to 2023, he’s already on his third team since Tampa Bay drafted him in 2019. He even requested a trade out of Tampa in 2023, once he realized the team wouldn’t be signing him to an extension.
White was a constant starter with the Buccaneers, he only started one game with the Houston Texans last year. Now with the Las Vegas Raiders, White’s new head coach, Pete Carroll, has been singing his praises.
“He’s back,” Carroll said. “He was on top of the world a few years ago and then things just didn’t work out for one reason or another. He’s back in action now. He came up to me and said ‘I’m all in now.’ And he was dead serious in how he said it.”
We’ll see if White can truly return to his peak form once again. If so, he should be able to receive what would be the second Pro Bowl nod of his career.
Related: Most Underrated NFL Players 2025: Identifying Most Underrated Player at Each Position
More must-reads:
