Opinion: Bucs' party time is over. Tom Brady is making sure it's all business in Tampa.

TAMPA — It was the second day of training camp, for crying out loud, before the Tampa Bay Buccaneers were even working in full pads.

The red zone drill ended as you’d think they hoped it would. Tom Brady — a “mobile TB12” approaching his 22nd NFL season — rolled a couple of steps out of the pocket and flipped a short pass to a target in the end zone. Touchdown. Life goes on to the next play.

Or not so fast. Brady was peeved. What just happened?

As the starters jogged off and gave way to the second-team unit, Brady took off his helmet and began screaming as he rolled with the pack. Lord knows what choice words came out of his mouth or what detail went awry on the play that ended with six, but it looked salty, and the dude was hotter than July.

Clearly, as Brady’s arms flailed, a message was sent.

“You should have saw him yesterday,” Bucs coach Bruce Arians told USA TODAY Sports after that early camp practice. “He’s on their ass! A young receiver jumped offsides twice. The first time he cut him some slack. He let him have it the second time. If you’re on this field, you don’t do that (expletive).”

For all of the motivational tactics that Arians can employ to remind the defending Super Bowl champs that there is no tolerance for complacency, nothing beats having the greatest winner in Super Bowl history to set the tone.

“I never forget where I came from,” Brady told USA TODAY Sports in August. It’s always worth repeating: Brady entered the NFL in 2000 as a sixth-round pick drafted 199th overall and now owns a record seven Super Bowl championship rings.

“For me, you have to put the work in. You can’t ever rest on your laurels in football. Whether it’s my 22nd year, like this year, or my 21st year like it was last year or my first year a long time ago, you just can’t show up and expect to get it done. That’s just how I feel like I need to approach every day to get the job done.”

That pretty much explains the intensity that Brady, 44, demonstrated on the practice field the first week of camp and surely will bring on Thursday night, when the Bucs host the Dallas Cowboys in the NFL’s kickoff game against the backdrop of raising a championship banner.

His top weapons are back

With Brady leading the way, the Bucs aim to become the first repeat Super Bowl champion since the 2004 season — when Brady quarterbacked the New England Patriots. Even more rare than that mission, Tampa Bay returns all 22 starters from the Super Bowl LV victory against the Kansas City Chiefs. This involves a bevy of weapons around Brady, including star wideouts Mike Evans, Chris Godwin and Antonio Brown, along with tight end Rob Gronkowski. It’s the first time since the 1979 Pittsburgh Steelers that a Super Bowl champ brought back all 22. And yes, those Steelers — with Mean Joe, Franco and Bradshaw in tow — won that repeat title.

Brady, though, sounds like a man with little appetite for waxing on history. Sure, the Bucs became the first team to win a Super Bowl in their home stadium, and they became the first wild-card team to win a Super Bowl since the Green Bay Packers achieved the feat a decade earlier. But as Brady will attest, none of that has anything to do with now.

“Last year’s last year,” Brady said. “I think it’s a lesson in pro sports. It never carries over from one year to the next. You’ve got to put the work in, guys have to be focused and disciplined on what we’ve got to do this year.

“We’ve celebrated all this stuff from last year and it was great and it was obviously an amazing experience for all of us. But it’s a new year with new challenges and we’ve got to go earn it. ... Hopefully, we’re going to start off in a better place.”

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When the Bucs opened the 2020 season with a loss at New Orleans, they were such a work in progress that several players didn’t even know all of the plays, Arians noted. With the offseason camps wiped out by the pandemic and training camp scaled back, the learning curve was steep as Brady adjusted to a new offense, new teammates and a new environment after 20 years in New England. Until the stretch run, they struggled to find rhythm and consistency.

In Week 5, they lost a nail-biter at Chicago when Brady lost track of the downs in crunch time. In Week 6, they blew out the Packers. In Week 9, they didn’t even score a touchdown and Brady had one of the worst games of his career during a blowout loss to the Saints on their own turf. After back-to-back home losses against the Rams and Chiefs, the Bucs were 7-5.

Then came the remarkable stretch run. Including the four postseason victories, the Bucs won their crown with an eight-game winning streak. That’s why the continuity that comes with every starter returning — including a few who could have bolted for more money as free agents — is so essential to the oddsmakers installing the Bucs as the favorite to repeat as champs.

“It’s not going to be like last year,” maintained Brady, whose 40 touchdown passes in 2020 marked the second-highest total for a season in his career after the then-NFL record 50 he threw in 2007. “But whatever 19 or 20 games we had together, those were important for us to learn one another, for us to communicate, learn each other’s body language, skill set, my expectations, theirs."

'Tell him (expletive) throw when it's a (expletive) throw'

How do you coach Brady? Let Arians, the blunt and undoubtedly charming man in the Kango hat, explain.

“You tell him '(expletive) throw’ when it’s a (expletive) throw,” Arians said. “He’s no different than nobody else. He loves it. We had a ball down here (in practice) and Chris (Godwin) had to fall down to catch it. We gained six (yards). It should have been a touchdown."

There were times last season when pointed comments from Arians led some to speculate whether there was a rift developing between the coach and quarterback. After all, Brady’s former coach, Bill Belichick, might have never specifically called out Brady in public.

In November, one of Brady’s former Patriots teammates, Rob Ninkovich, even insisted that the Bucs needed a new coach because Arians threw the iconic quarterback “under the bus” when maintaining that a misread in coverage contributed to a blunder during a loss against the Rams.

“We had a lot of good laughs over that (expletive),” Arians reflected. “Ninkovich. (Expletive). He doesn’t know.”

Brady can take the heat. And he can dish it out to teammates, too. That’s why he’s the ultimate insurance policy against complacency for the Bucs.

“He’s just all about his business, especially when you get out here,” second-year tackle Tristan Wirfs said. “He’s one of his own biggest critics. He expects a lot out of himself. I think that kind of radiates on everybody else on the team.”

Wirfs, 22, has also formulated another impression of a man who has been in the NFL for nearly as long as Wirfs has been alive.

“Getting to know him in the locker room, he’s got a lot of ‘Dad jokes’ in his pocket,” Wirfs said.

That much is hardly seen on the football field. Yet during the championship victory lap of recent months, Brady showed off other facets of his persona. He threw the precious Lombardi Trophy off his boat to teammates on another during the floating championship parade. He was a hoot on late-night talk shows. And he cracked jokes during the Bucs' visit to the White House in July.

No, Brady isn’t really a cyborg … even if he eats avocado ice cream and is still rolling in his mid-40s as the NFL’s oldest player.

“How people see me versus how I feel I am are two totally different things,” Brady said. “I feel like I’m having fun.”

Funny, how he quickly transitioned from talking about fun to mentioning how much he enjoys practicing. In other words, he is still the same ol' TB12. And practice is fun. He insists that when it comes to football, it’s about doing his job, trying to get his teammates on the same page and building trust in the locker room.

“Whether I was in Foxborough or down here in Tampa or anywhere else,” Brady said, “that’s kind of how I always do it.”

Which, as a new season looms, is bad news for the rest of the NFL.

Follow USA TODAY Sports' Jarrett Bell on Twitter @JarrettBell.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Bucs' party time is over. Tom Brady and Co. are all business in Tampa.