The Bucs have been trying to tell us who they are — maybe it’s time to start listening and believing them
The Bucs continue to look as far from a playoff team as they could over the last month.
The Tampa Bay Buccaneers had one of the stinkers of the entire NFL season on Sunday by any playoff contender, losing 24-20 at home to the 2-10 New Orleans Saints. The loss dropped the Bucs to 7-6 on the season.
Thanks to the mediocrity of the NFC South, the Bucs are still in a playoff position. They’re tied at 7-6 with the idle Carolina Panthers atop the division with two games remaining between the two teams. So the good news is the Bucs still control their destiny.
And that’s also the bad news, as the Bucs have shown nothing over the last two months to lead anyone rational to believe that they can turn that destiny into a playoff appearance. And that was never more obvious than on Sunday inside Raymond James Stadium.
The loss to the Saints is the another in a string of poor performances in both wins and (mostly) losses over the last 2 months
The Bucs looked very much like a playoff team after finishing of the San Francisco 49ers 30-19 to improve to 5-1 back in mid-October. And a road loss to Detroit wasn’t surprising given the Lions’ talent and the loss of Mike Evans to a broken clavicle. The Bucs beat the Saints 23-3 and entered the bye week at 6-2 and feeling pretty good about things.
But oh, how things have fallen off after a break. A 28-23 home loss to the Patriots saw the Bucs’ defense allow a number of chunk plays in the passing game and on the ground. And the problems continued the next two weeks on the road, as the Bucs allowed 44 and 34 points in losses to the Bills and Rams. Tampa Bay temporarily stopped the bleeding with a narrow 20-17 win over Arizona last week that required a late fourth-down stop to preserve the win over the three-win Cardinals.
But this was a truly gross performance on both sides of the ball, but again on defense. The Saints – one of the league’s worst offenses led by rookie QB Tyler Shough – put together three touchdown drives on the day, and two of them ended with Shough running to the end zone through broken tackles for touchdowns.
And against a New Orleans defense that’s been decent scoring wise, the Bucs could get next to nothing going in the passing game. Mayfield threw for just 122 yards on 14/30 passing for a touchdown and a pick. The ground game, outside of a Bucky Irving 32-yard touchdown, couldn’t get enough chunk runs and positive plays to sustain drives. And when the Bucs needed a big swing play to go their way, the ball slipped literally through their fingers, as it did with Emeka Egbuka’s dropped fourth quarter touchdown that cost the Bucs four points – or the margin of loss.
The Bucs looked like a bad football team on Sunday. And that’s uncoincidentally because they have been one over the past several weeks. And as such, if the Bucs miss the playoffs when all is said and done, don’t be surprised. That’s what teams who aren’t playoff caliber do.
