Bucs Hope to Sign Ndamukong Suh, Shaq Barrett to New Contracts After Super Bowl

Tampa Bay Buccaneers general manager Jason Licht said Thursday he would love to have defensive tackle Ndamukong Suh and edge-rusher Shaq Barrett next season during an appearance on the Pewter Report podcast (h/t Mark Cook of PewterReport.com).

Both players are set to hit free agency this offseason. 

Licht said of Suh:

"I think he's said it, that'd he'd love to come back here. I know that there's mutual respect for each other and I've told him that we'd like to have him back. We're just kind of letting the dust settle here for a couple days, we've got some time here. You never hit utopia I guess unless you win the Super Bowl, but a lot of things we want to try to do, I'm hoping we can do, we'll have to see how it all shakes out, but he's definitely one that we want back."

Suh, 34, posted 44 tackles, six sacks, 19 quarterback hits and a forced fumble this season, forming a solid interior partnership with Vita Vea. 

The situation with Shaq Barrett is more complicated, who told Adam Schein on SiriusXM's Mad Dog Sports Radio Thursday that he wants to get paid in a big way this offseason (h/t Kevin Patra of NFL.com).

"I'm most definitely looking forward to getting a long-term deal done... I feel like it's time for me to break the bank now, and I most definitely want to do that to be able to set my family up better and most definitely going to keep producing, so it's not like anything is going to fall off. I still think I got a lot left in the tank. I'm still getting better, actually," he said.

Licht was measured in his response to those comments.

"I probably won't touch on that," he said. "I'm proud of Shaq. I understand that this is a business, and there's no hard feelings over this. It's just part of doing business, we'll see what happens. We'd love to have Shaq back, that's for sure."

Barrett, 28, posted 57 tackles, eight sacks and 16 quarterback hits in 2020, pairing with Jason Pierre-Paul to give the team a dangerous push off the edge. What he didn't do was come anywhere close to matching his massive 19.5-sack season from 2019, though he was still effective this past season. 

This issue in Tampa is that quite a few key players will be free agents besides Barrett and Suh, including linebacker Lavonte David and wideouts Chris Godwin and Antonio Brown, tight end Rob Gronkowski and running back Leonard Fournette, among others. David and Godwin will almost assuredly be the priority for the Bucs, and if Barrett is hoping to break the bank, he may have to do so with another team.