How the Buccaneers Deftly Navigated Hurricane Milton Off the Field and on It, Too

Tampa’s staff secured 350 hotel rooms for the week, brought families and pets to New Orleans while some chose to stay in Florida, and they also tried to minimize distractions so the players could prep for a football game.

Antoine Winfield Jr. celebrated a touchdown Sunday with Buccaneers fans impacted by Hurricane Milton. / Matthew Hinton-Imagn Images

High above the field, in the suites at the Caesars Superdome in New Orleans, Tampa Bay Buccaneers GM Jason Licht was having the same thought a lot of people were watching his team. Those players and coaches, in the wake of Hurricane Milton, had been through a lot, displaced for almost a week, and living and working day to day in New Orleans, through three hotels, a college campus, and, finally, this iconic stadium.

They’d come out of the gate against the Saints like Secretariat.

But the 17–0 lead they zoomed to in the game’s first 20 minutes evaporated as quickly as it came—with a punt return accounting for one Saints score, Baker Mayfield interceptions accounting for two more, and Spencer Rattler’s first touchdown pass as a pro putting New Orleans up 20–17 midway through the second quarter.

Had the Buccaneers run out of gas? It did cross Licht’s mind. Or maybe more than just that.

“I thought it was going to be a little bit like the week, where it started out fine, nothing’s going to happen, and then the s--- hits the fan.”

- Bucs GM Jason Licht

“I thought it was going to be a little bit like the week,” the GM says, “where it started out fine, nothing’s going to happen, and then the s--- hits the fan.”

Which brings us to the cool part of the story of the Buccaneers’ week.

The team responded in the same way the organization had all week, rallying to turn things around, and winning in the end.

It’s always tough to draw parallels between real-life situations such as Milton and adversity in sports because they are two different things. Someone having a tree land on their house is not the same as a football team having to deal with a bad stretch of competition. But the reality is that this particular football team was faced with both things over the past 10 days.

To anyone’s reasonable expectation, they could come out feeling good about themselves on both counts. The entire operation was able to pull together, pull up stakes, and move to Louisiana for a few days while accommodating those choosing to stay behind and ride out the storm in different parts of Florida. The football team responded in kind, taking those 20 consecutive points from the Saints and answering by outscoring their hosts 34–7 the rest of the way to lock down a week-capping 51–27 rout.

“And at the end of the week,” Licht said to cap the analogy, “everything’s not as bad as we thought it was going to be.”

It took the work of a lot of people to give the GM the chance to say that, as he headed for the team plane to, finally, return home. Licht knew, too, that there were parts of Florida that wound up getting it worse than Tampa, which only underscored to him that the Bucs’ good work was met with some good fortune, too. And plenty to be thankful for in the final equation.

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We’re wrapping up Week 6 and there’s plenty to cover from a Sunday filled with routs and reckonings. In the takeaways, we’ll get to …

• The Detroit Lions’ explosion in Dallas, and the rubble it left the Cowboys sorting through.

• Why the Philadelphia Eagles are an example of how we still don’t have the 2024 season figured out.

• How the Houston Texans are showing just how good they can be.

But we’re starting in Florida, and with the bigger-than-football situation that the Bucs just deftly navigated.

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On Oct. 5, two days after the Bucs took a gut-punch Thursday night loss in Atlanta, and just after Hurricane Helene had done enough damage to displace a few team employees, Licht got sent a screenshot from Mike’s Weather Page. The Florida site tracks hurricanes, and it showed Milton near Mexico as a Category 5 storm. Licht screenshotted the satellite and sent it to team co-owner Joel Glazer, then to director of team operations Tim Jarocki.

“I’m already on it,” Jarocki texted Licht.

The next day, with the team on its mini-bye, Licht was out with his sons when Jarocki told the GM things were looking bleak, and he was going to start looking for hotel and meeting space in case the team had to move. The unfortunate reality of being in Florida is that Jarocki, Licht, and the Glazers had been down this road before—in 2022, they evacuated to South Florida for Hurricane Ian, and in ’17, they went to Charlotte to avoid Irma.

Initially, the Bucs booked a hotel with meeting space in Houston and arranged to practice during the week at Rice University, with plans to go from Houston to New Orleans on Saturday. But Jarocki and his staff kept chipping away at the possibility that they could just go to Louisiana and eventually broke through with some connections they had with the Hyatt Regency in New Orleans, and through Avi and Jill Glazer, who live in that area.

“At the last minute, Jarocki was able to get 350 rooms,” Licht says, “which is almost impossible.”

The final arrangement had the team and family members (and even pets) who wanted to make the trip staying at the Hyatt Regency, with the caveat being the team wouldn’t have meeting space on site until Thursday. That pushed the coaches’ and players’ meetings to Wednesday, perhaps the most important day of the work week, to the Ritz-Carlton about a half-dozen blocks away (a five-minute bus ride). Practice was held at Tulane where, per Licht, “We’re looking at the Jill and Avram Glazer Club Area.”

The team moved Friday to the JW Marriott, where it had planned to stay for the trip, but could only take the Bucs a day earlier than their scheduled Saturday arrival.

For those family members who preferred to stay in Florida, the Glazers booked 200 hotel rooms in Orlando (at the Omni Orlando Resort at ChampionsGate) and Gainesville, inland areas where Milton was forecast to have less of an impact.

More than 350 team employees and family members, with more than 30 pets in tow, chose to make the trip with the team to New Orleans. A couple hundred more—including Licht’s wife, Blair, and their children—shuttled to Orlando and Gainesville, wanting to stay closer to home for a variety of reasons.

Wheels up for the outside Louisiana traveling party was 9 a.m. Tuesday. For their part, Jarocki and his top lieutenants, Zach Orth and Joe Dowell, made it as easy as possible on everyone who was on the planes.

“I didn’t do anything,” Licht says, laughing.” I am just following the directions just like everybody else—here’s your room. Here’s the itinerary. My job was to keep everybody positive. I just tried to keep everybody positive. We’re going to have as normal of a week as possible. That’s what Todd [Bowles] wanted. He wanted all the families to be safe. He was very appreciative of the owners doing this. We wanted to keep the players focused like this was a normal week as much as we can.”

On the ground in New Orleans, the Buccaneers went the extra mile to make that happen.

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Mayfield and Tucker celebrated after one of two touchdowns by Tucker during the Buccaneers' win over the Saints on Sunday. / Matthew Hinton-Imagn Images

Second-year running back Sean Tucker, who wound up being one of the weekend’s (football) heroes, remembered getting the message on his phone, while the players had their time off after the Thursday game in Atlanta. It said to be ready to travel early in the week with the storm coming. Soon after, the guys got the news that they were going.

“It was adversity coming here not knowing how it would play out, what the routine would be, just trying to get everything settled so that you can focus as much as possible on football and practice,” Tucker says over the phone from the locker room after the game.

Part of the adversity was not having any idea when anyone would be coming back. The early indications really assured them nothing.

“We thought it was going to be the most catastrophic thing to ever happen to Tampa,” Licht says. “If it was a direct hit, all of South Tampa would be flooded. We’d all possibly have huge damage to our houses. It could have been [Hurricane] Katrina.”

Tucker parked his car on a high level of a garage near his place, and shut off his power before leaving. Licht took some of his family’s valuables and moved them to a storage unit, with warnings that a catastrophic storm could be followed by looting.

Then, they all went with football as a welcomed distraction.

And to give the players and coaches that distraction, which allowed them to focus on football until they’d return home, the Buccaneers had to give everyone else on the trip their own diversion. On Wednesday, there was a trip for families to New Orleans City Park. On Thursday, there was an organized, complimentary trip to the New Orleans Zoo. Director of player engagement Duke Preston also had smaller trips organized to museums, restaurants and local landmarks for all of the kids in town.

The players returned to the Hyatt from their meetings at the Ritz at 5 p.m. CT Wednesday, did everything but practice at the Hyatt on Thursday, then had morning meetings and breakfast at the Hyatt on Friday before moving to the JW Marriott.

Meanwhile, everyone was monitoring the landfall of the storm in Florida overnight on Wednesday and Thursday.

“For us, it was through word of mouth and then social media,” Tucker says.

Licht woke up in the wee hours Thursday and thought to take a quick look at where the storm was—and saw it was heading south of where most Bucs folks live. A few hours later, his neighborhood text group was buzzing with pictures and updates of the damage. A doctor who lives down the street from the Lichts and habitually will hunker and live off generators in these situations was on the scene to keep those on the thread apprised (“He lives for that s---,” Licht joked). 

By midday, it was clear that most of the folks in New Orleans had dodged a bullet at home.

"Most people were relieved that the flooding didn’t happen,”  Licht says. “At the same time, everybody was not happy. Somebody had to get it. Sarasota did. … It’s a creepy feeling because you’re happy you were spared, but the videos of the people that were back in Tampa, it already looked like a war zone in some neighborhoods.”

And part of the hope of the Bucs a few states away was that, on Sunday afternoon, they might be able to give some of those folks an escape.

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Tucker rushed for 125 yards on 13 carries against the Saints. / Stephen Lew-Imagn Images

There were a lot of great things for the Buccaneers to take from Sunday football-wise.

OC Liam Coen’s run game, which everyone had been excited about, came alive with 277 yards on 35 carries. It was so effective, in fact, that Mayfield only had to throw the ball six times in the second half. All the same, the quarterback bounced back nicely from his three first-half picks, completing five of those six throws for 93 yards and two touchdowns. And Bowles’s defense shut the Saints out, allowing only 107 yards in the second half.

Tucker was a great story, too. His 36-yard touchdown catch in the first half—he leaked out of the backfield after staying in to protect and sliced right through the Saints’ defense to paydirt—stemmed the tide of the big blown lead, putting the Bucs back up 24–20. His 125 yards on 13 carries in the second half were essential to Tampa controlling the rest of the game. And just that he’s in that sort of role, as a former undrafted free agent in his second year, is pretty cool, too.

But, really, to those there in New Orleans, and those in Florida, this wasn’t about one thing or one person. It was about all of it and everyone involved.

“This week, we just stuck together. We leaned on each other. Being down here in a new place for an extended period of time, everyone coming together, making sure everyone’s family is safe, everyone still having to deal with practice, I feel like we definitely jell together more after this week.”

- Sean Tucker

“This week, we just stuck together,” Tucker says. “We leaned on each other. Being down here in a new place for an extended period of time, everyone coming together, making sure everyone’s family is safe, everyone still having to deal with practice, I feel like we definitely jell together more after this week.”

That’d be the hope, anyway.

And if there’s evidence that it’s already happening, maybe it came at that point, after the Bucs blew the big lead, when even the GM was worried the players were running out of gas.

Bowles, for his part, kept a steady hand on his players throughout the week. Jarocki and his team worked around the clock to make sure everyone else had things a little easier. The owners followed through on a pledge they made—“Whatever you need”—to Licht and the rest of the team’s executives early in the week. The players responded Sunday.

“It’s just how everybody comes together in times like this,” Licht says, when I asked what he was most proud of. “Nobody complains. Everybody realizes what they need to do. It’s just like during the losing streak last year. We all know. Nobody’s pointing fingers. Nobody’s pointing blame. Everybody just knows we got to stay together to get through it.”

And through a lot of work, and a little luck, the Bucs did—victoriously.