Rob Gronkowski said the 2020 Tampa Bay Buccaneers were probably the best skill-set team he had ever played on, a lineup he said featured Mike Evans, Chris Godwin, Antonio Brown, Leonard Fournette and himself. He pointed to the way that group came together late in the season and carried it into a championship run that ended with a 31-9 Super Bowl 55 win over the Kansas City Chiefs.
Gronkowski said the Buccaneers were still trying to figure things out during training camp after being assembled through the offseason, but the pieces began to fit after the bye week. From there, he said, Tampa Bay went undefeated, won eight in a row, and finished with four straight regular-season victories to reach the playoffs before taking four playoff games in a row.
That final surge mattered because the Buccaneers were doing it under unusual pressure. The 2020 season had brought together Gronkowski with Tom Brady and a pass-catching group that, in his telling, only found its rhythm after some early uneven stretches. Once it clicked, he said, the offense settled into the same plays and the same script in the final two weeks before Super Bowl 55.
The result was a title won on home turf. Gronkowski said the Buccaneers were rewarded for that road-heavy run by getting the Super Bowl in Tampa Bay, which he said was the first time a team had won the game in its own stadium. It was also the kind of run he said he had experienced before only in pieces, not in one sustained stretch from the middle of the season through the championship.
“Skill-wise, I think that team was probably the best skill set team I’ve ever been on throughout my career,” Gronkowski said of the 2020 Buccaneers. He added that the group had “everyone” it needed, naming Evans, Godwin, Brown, Fournette and himself as the core of that offense.
The comments came recently on the 4th and South podcast with Leonard Fournette and Jarvis Landry. They also fit into the broader comparison Gronkowski has drawn between Tampa Bay and New England, where he spent most of his career and won three Super Bowls. He was a four-time All-Pro, was named to the Hall’s All-Decade Team for the 2010s, and is expected to be a first-ballot Hall of Famer in the summer of 2027.
What stands out is how little, by Gronkowski’s account, changed on the whiteboard once the Buccaneers found their stride. He said the same exact plays stayed on the script for the final two weeks before Super Bowl 55, and that the group executed them the way it had practiced. For a team that started the year still learning each other, that consistency became the difference between potential and a title.
