For the last several weeks, Tampa Bay Buccaneers fans stressed over whether or not fan-favorite Lavonte David would return for his 12th season in pewter and red.

Well, apparently, there very little -if anything at all- to stress over. 

"Everybody knows I want to be a Buc throughout my whole career and there's nowhere else I'd rather be," David told reporters Thursday. "… I feel like the best place to be was to stay in Tampa [and] kind of finish what I started. 

"I've been there my whole career. I don't want to be anywhere else. I've made basically, like, a family there. So I'm definitely excited to be back and I'm ready to get back to playing football."

David's decision to return is instrumental when looking at it through an overall team perspective: his return keeps the defensive core from 2022 intact. The play of Vita Vea, David, Devin White, Jamel Dean, Carlton Davis III, and Antoine Winfield Jr. will dictate a lot of the defensive success; so, the ability to retain both David and Dean was clutch, to say the least. 

"I'm confident in what we got," said David "We got the majority of our locker room still there and still intact. We lost some key pieces, obviously, but the majority of our locker room is still intact and that's something that I really, really like. We added a quarterback and brought Jamel [Dean] back, so that was a big, big thing for the organization. I feel like we're still gonna be a confident group."

The bond that has developed between David and the Buccaneers is one that transpires the rocky road that is the NFL. Very, very few players get to build what David's built in Tampa Bay.

"I feel like once you start somewhere [and] you want to build a legacy somewhere [and] you got a lot a lot of good things going on with one organization, why would you want to leave," David asked, rhetorically. "… In the back of my mind I knew the Bucs wanted me back and I knew I wanted to go back to the Bucs. So I knew this year, it'd all work out."

And while all of the relationship stuff and the on-field stuff is great – it doesn't hurt that David's name is now etched in another category that contains a drastically small fraction of the franchise's truly elite players.

"It is very important," David said when asked how important it is to retire as a Buc. "It's been thrown out there that only three guys have played 12+ years with the organization. I'm glad to be the fourth guy. Ronde [Barber] played 16 years, DB [Derrick Brooks] played 14 years, and I think Paul Gruber played for 12 years, I want to say. So, to be mentioned with those guys will always be a great deal. 

"And for me to be able to come into my 12th season with one organization is very, very rare, especially in this day and age with everybody jumping teams [and] just looking out for themselves, I would say."

David's 12th season is an important one. The Buccaneers are officially in the post-Tom Brady era and is undergoing a major makeover. It needs as much consistency and leadership that it can possibly get in order to navigate the impending change.

Fortunately, Brady's time with the Buccaneers set the foundation for consistency, leadership, and the know-how to win at an elite level in the NFL. He passed that down to players like David and now, it's his turn to pass it to the new players in what will hopefully be a steady stream of consistent success from here on out.

"We just need everybody to buy into what we are trying to do as a football team," said David. "And that's trying to win games and win the division, first and foremost. And like I said, for the most part, we got a lot of those core guys that have been in locker room and knows what it takes to get there. We know how to do it and just all you got to do is pass it on to the guys who are new in the building."