Jason Licht says Buccaneers are not rebuilding, wants to compete for a championship

Jason Licht does not think the Tampa Bay Buccaneers are rebuilding. No, he wants to compete for a championship. That's what he told Sirius XM NFL radio today in an interview with Zig Fracassi and Booger McFarland.

"This wasn't a rebuild, this was a little bit of a re-tool," Jason Licht said. "When you have players like Gerald McCoy and Lavonte David and Mark Barron and Vincent Jackson and the list goes on and on, you can't call it a rebuild. We just had a little re-tooling to do and shape it up a little bit, and kind of get some depth and get some other players, some of the middle-market-type players to do the dirty work and that's what we're still doing."

This is not a real surprise: the Bucs have a ton of talent on the roster, especially on defense, and while they have some issues at guard an quarterback, no team is without question marks. Overall, they have a very good group here. This is not a situation where they need to spend years collecting talent to build a quality roster.

"We want to compete for this division and we want to compete for a championship here. And you know, just one game has been played and just one quarter starters, there's no reason to panic. We still know what we are, and we feel very good about it."

Of course, when Jason Licht and Lovie Smith set those goals, that's what we're going to have to judge them by. Can they compete for a championship? Can they even compete for a playoff spot, let alone a division title? That's what we're going to have to see this season.

Jason Licht also said that Josh McCown struggled mostly due to the pressure, but they still like what they see in training camp. You can listen to the whole interview below.