Tight end Rob Gronkowski returned to NFL after one year of retirement ahead of the 2020 season and found out that the league looked a lot different. The coronavirus pandemic affected lots of things in and around the NFL, forcing Gronkowski to adjust while also robbing him of the chance to have a full offseason with his new team, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
But this didn’t stop Gronk from finding a way to have some fun.
Like all NFL players, Gronkowski had to take part in a virtual offseason that included filming his workouts and sending them to the Bucs’ coaching staff. While the 31-year-old veteran was methodical in his approach initially, it quickly got “boring” for him. So he pulled a genius prank on Tampa Bay strength and conditioning coach Anthony Piroli.
When he was doing sprints, Gronkowski would film a week-worth of material in just one day. He would swap the shirts he had after few reps, making it look like it was a different workout. Then, he would just roll-out a clip with a different shirt each day.
“I started tricking him. I would bring my shirt out, and then I would bring another shirt out, so when I’m running the sprints, I would film myself, like, 15 times for that session,” Gronk admitted in a recent interview with Fox. “But I would run it in a couple of different shirts because you only had to send in two or three reps. So when the next time came, I didn’t have to film myself because I already filmed myself running in a different shirt every time on that one day.”
According to Gronkowski, Piroli didn’t notice anything unusual and completely bought into the scam.
The Bucs coaching staff will probably forgive Rob Gronkowski for his antics, especially since he was productive for them in 2020. He had 45 receptions for 623 yards and seven touchdowns in the regular season while adding two catches for 43 yards in the playoffs.
