With HBO’s Hard Knocks at Tampa Bay Buccaneers training camp, it feels like a playoffs or bust year for Tampa Bay. Will the be able to get it done in 2017?
While all three of their division rivals have played in Super Bowls in the last decade, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers are facing a nine-year postseason draught. The last time the Buccaneers won the NFC South was back in 2007 and Jon Gruden was their head coach. It has been ages since the Buccaneers won with the Tampa 2 defense, but optimism is in the air at Buccaneers camp.
Last season saw Tampa Bay go 9-7 under first-year head coach Dirk Koetter. He and franchise quarterback Jameis Winston made great strides in their second year working together. Keep in mind that Koetter was Winston’s offensive coordinator in his rookie year of 2015.
While Tampa Bay drafted very well, being able to most-notably land Alabama Crimson Tide standout tight end O.J. Howard in the first round, the Buccaneers crushed it in free agency. They were able to improve on offense by signing vertical threat wide receiver DeSean Jackson. Tampa Bay made two sound acquisitions defensively by getting Chris Baker in the trenches and J.J. Wilcox in the secondary.
Simply put, Tampa Bay should be at worst a top-half team in the NFC this year. The Buccaneers have too much talent to finish below .500 in any capacity. Is this the year that the Buccaneers end their playoff drought? Well, Winston, Koetter and Co. certainly hope so.
This team will be well-coached. Koetter has been an established offensive mind for years. He had been the Atlanta Falcons offensive coordinator before arriving in Tampa. Before that, he had success coaching out west collegiately for the Arizona State Sun Devils and the Boise State Broncos.
Backing him up defensively is former Falcons head coach Mike Smith. Getting Smitty back for a second season as a defensive coordinator is huge for the Buccaneers. Smith can make this a top-10 defense in 2017 with the amount of talent he has. His defenses are strong in the front-seven. He has two elite talents in defensive tackle Gerald McCoy and linebacker Lavonte David. The secondary still needs to improve, but that’s not Smith’s coaching forte.
Tampa Bay plays its best ball when it can lean on its defense. It’s just part of the fabric of this team’s football culture for the last 40-plus years. The biggest difference under Koetter is that the Buccaneers can actually sling the pigskin.
Winston is a perfect type of athlete to run the Air Coryell for Koetter. In college, Winston not only starred for the Florida State Seminoles as a Ben Roethlisberger type of quarterback, he was a power pitcher in the Seminoles bullpen on the baseball diamond. In short, Winston can make all the throws and thrives in pressure-packed situations. Accuracy and decision-making are his two biggest criticisms entering year three in the NFL.
While the Buccaneers’ offensive line might be only middle of the pack to slightly below average, Winston will have a bevy of receiving targets to thread the needle to. We mentioned Jackson’s vertical threat ability earlier. Winston has a top-eight wideout in football in Mike Evans, as one of the best young possession receivers in the game.
The Buccaneers could have an elite tight end tandem with him and Cameron Brate. Brate is coming off a strong year with the Buccaneers in 2016. It’s hard to believe he played for the Harvard Crimson. The kid can play. Lastly, let’s not overlook the youngster out of Penn State in Chris Godwin. Though he may not be Allen Robinson (who is really?), he can be a viable No. 3 wideout option for Winston to progress in the passing game.
If anything sinks this potentially high-flying Buccaneers offense, it will be the ground game. Though immensely talented, Doug Martin is unreliable and may not be with the team for very long. If the Buccaneers can’t run the football, Koetter will abandon the running game faster than you can snap your fingers. A lack of balance offensively could prove disastrous for Winston. The more times he has to throw over 40 times per game, the worse it will be for the Buccaneers.
On defense, Smith knows that he has a great opportunity to be a head coach again. Atlanta moved on from him after a miserable 6-10 season in 2014. Smith was a finalist for the Los Angeles Chargers job this year. He will lead another NFL team very soon, but he has to see growth in his secondary for him to re-emerge as a top-tier coaching candidate for the next trip on the carousel in January.
Tampa Bay will play a second-place schedule in arguably the toughest division in football. The NFC South should send at least two teams into the NFC playoffs. If the NFC East and North underwhelm, maybe both wild cards teams come out of this ultra-competitive division?
For any of this good stuff to happen with the Buccaneers, they will have to protect their house at Raymond James Stadium. Tampa Bay has too much talent to be a lousy home team again in 2016. Going anything worse than 5-3 at home is no longer acceptable for a team that has serious NFC playoff aspirations.
Overall, this is a team that can win as many as 11 games this season if it all goes right. 8-8 might be the floor, but this is not a deep team by any stretch of the imagination. Should the injuries start to add up, this rocking ship in Florida could be sank before Thanksgiving.
Tampa Bay has to honestly assess itself and ask one important question: How badly do you want to get back into the NFC Playoffs? How the team collectively answers that question will decide this on-the-rise club’s fate.
X-Factor
We’re going to go in a little different direction here, but if second-year cornerback Vernon Hargreaves III plays up to his hype, this team could win the NFC South. Tampa Bay needs to be more competitive in the secondary to emerge as a serious Super Bowl contender.
While Hargreaves doesn’t have the best body type on the outside, he was a highly productive player at Florida for mostly Will Muschamp. He may not have stood out had he been in the 2017 NFL Draft class, so maybe leaving Gainesville a year early was a great thing for him?
He was a blue-chipper both coming into the SEC and the NFL. Hargreaves is the best talent Smith has in his secondary. We know Smitty will have that front-seven playing at a high level. If he can get Hargreaves to make that big jump in year two, this could be a top-tier defense in football that can lead a double-digit win team to the NFC playoffs.
Best Case
Tampa Bay’s ceiling isn’t as high as Atlanta’s or is as proven as the Carolina Panthers, but the Buccaneers can absolutely win the NFC South at 10-6 or 11-5. Anything more than that in the regular season would be gravy.
The Buccaneers would have an outside shot at getting a first-round bye in the 2017 NFC Playoffs, but a home playoff game is totally in play. From there, it is really all about matchups for this young Buccaneers team.
Tampa Bay may have the all-around talent to play in maybe even the 2017 NFC Championship Game regardless of seeding. This feels like a team that can be somewhere in that No. 3 to No. 6 seed in the NFC, capable of winning multiple playoff games. Tampa Bay isn’t a Super Bowl team, but could be a top-six team in football next year if it all goes right. The window would be open beginning in 2018.
Worst Case
Frankly, this would have to come down to the offense being a massive disappointment. Winston is unable to stop turning the football over. The running game is terrible and Koetter becomes Mike Martz offensively: all pass, all the time. Howard doesn’t love football and gets pushed around by the Falcons and Panthers’ linebacking corps. Jackson loses a step and the offensive line is a wet paper bag.
All of this combines into friction between Winston and Koetter. Hard Knocks proves to be a terrible idea for this on-the-rise team, leaving them exposed on their second-place schedule. Tampa Bay doesn’t establish a home-field advantage and goes 2-4 in NFC South play.
The Buccaneers enter Week 17 at 6-9 with an outside shot at the No. 6 seed. It goes horribly and the Buccaneers somehow find themselves picking inside of the top-10, wondering what on Planet Earth happened to this team. In short, the 2017 Buccaneers are the 2014 Falcons and they have Hard Knocks to blame.
Final Word
If this team is not competing for a playoff berth heading into Christmas, expect wholesale changes to this organization. There is too much talent and too much promise for this team to be sub-.500 barring a rampant unforeseen injuries. Depth is not a strength of this team, but the upside with these Buccaneers is simply undeniable.
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Double-digit wins is definitely in play. They will have to prove that they are better than the Falcons and the Panthers, but will be in the mix to win the division for most of the season. This is probably a wild card team, but a high-end one at that. If this team is anything like the New York Giants or Oakland Raiders last season, Tampa Bay fans would absolutely take that. Anything besides a playoff berth is not acceptable any more.