The free agency dinner bell will ring in four weeks and this time of year has Joe remembering when Team Glazer stopped going the Aldi route when it came to buying/paying players and stepped up to Whole Foods with an Amex Black card.

Payroll changed drastically at One Buc Palace after the asinine lockout season of 2011, when a new labor agreement emerged that forced bottom-spender teams like the Bucs to stop hoarding cash.

And spend Team Glazer did.

Fans will remember how Team Glazer made it rain in March 2012 — after making fans cry the previous year. A Team Glazer-approved private jet was dispatched to bring the late Vincent Jackson to Tampa and not let him leave without signing a five-year, $55.5 million contract that some said was to honor the jersey number of his new quarterback, Josh Freeman.

Team Glazer rolled out the jet for other free agents in subsequent years, but the practice apparently died out. However, Team Glazer was back in the jet game this month when the owners insisted on flying Bruce Arians’ 95-year-old mother to the Super Bowl.

During a Showtime appearance, Arians gushed about the offer from ownership and explained that the Arians family was “scared to death” of COVID and traveling mom/grandma/great grandma to the game. Arians, who has called Team Glazer incredible many times over the past season, said the gracious offer sealed the deal and his mother was ecstatic to get out of her home.

“She was so pissed off she couldn’t go to bingo all year,” Arians said.

Mom was fired up before and after the game, Arians said, nothing afterwards she was fond of saying, “Down, down, down went the Chiefs.”