Loyal Buccaneer LaVonte David declares 'Bucs or nowhere else' for 2026, prioritizing Tampa Bay and the coaching staff's return.
Tampa Bay Buccaneers legend LaVonte David made his intentions clear on Thursday: He’ll either play with the Bucs in 2026 or he won’t play anywhere.
David has been with Tampa for 14 seasons, having made three All-Pro teams and helped the Bucs to a Super Bowl in the 2020 season.
But time catches up with everybody, and at 36, David is at the point in his career where any season could be the last.
That includes this past season. David, who will be an unrestricted free agent when the window opens in March, doesn’t know what he’s going to do yet. But the good news for Bucs fans is that playing somewhere other than Tampa Bay doesn’t appear to be an option.
"It's Bucs or nowhere else," David said in an interview with the "Up and Adams Show" on Thursday. “I played my 14-year career with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and they've been real, they've been loyal to me. The fans have been real loyal to me and my family. I've grown to love the city ... me being somewhere else, it wouldn't feel right."
David also confirmed the Buccaneers want him back, which eases speculation that the Bucs would part ways with the aging linebacker.
Another interesting note that came out of the podcast interview was that David doesn’t feel he would have returned to the Bucs if Todd Bowles didn’t come back as head coach.
Because the Bucs’ 2025 season ended the way it did -- losing seven of their last nine games and losing out on the NFC South championship for the first time since 2019 -- some wanted the Bucs to make a change at head coach.
David was not among them.
He and Bowles have been together since Bowles became Tampa Bay’s defensive coordinator in 2019, the same year the Bucs hired Bruce Arians as head coach.
David gave Bowles an immediate defensive cornerstone to work with, having already been elected to two All-Pro teams.
He was named to his third All-Pro team in 2020.
David, Arians and Bowles have been part of the most successful stretch in franchise history, with five of Tampa Bay’s 10 division championships coming in the 2020s.
Arians currently serves as a senior consultant for the Bucs. David might be retiring and Bowles is one bad year away from, at best, being on the hot seat.
The Bucs also don’t know if they’ll have Mike Evans, their longest-tenured player aside from David, back for 2026, since he’s also a free agent. So things might be looking quite different in Tampa Bay soon.
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