Buccaneers at Saints: Opening Line favors New Orleans and for good reason

Tampa Bay Buccaneers will be underdogs to begin season vs. New Orleans Saints

The Tampa Bay Buccaneers will open up the 2020 campaign against their hated rival, the New Orleans Saints, this Sunday afternoon.

The Buccaneers enter this fall with a renewed sense of hope and urgency after a successful offseason saw them bring in QB Tom Brady, TE Rob Gronkowski, RB Leonard Fournette and re-sign key pieces like Shaquil Barrett, Jason Pierre-Paul and Ndamukong Suh.

When you add two starting pieces from the 2020 NFL Draft in RT Tristan Wirfs and S Antoine Winfield Jr. to the mix, you can see why there are analysts high on Tampa Bay as we enter this season.

That being said, the Buccaneers will be underdogs to begin this new season against the Saints.

Opening Line: Buccaneers will look to play spoiler and upset Saints at home

The Buccaneers enter this game as a 3.5-point underdog, according to Bovada.

The Saints have been favored by about that much since the line opened and that number has hovered right around the same amount throughout the offseason.

One interesting piece to this whole ordeal is the fact that there won’t be any fans in the Superdome when this game is played. New Orleans has one of the top home environments in the league and that will, at least in some respects, be held completely at-bay with no fans allowed in the stadium.

That being said, it’s still the Saints and you’re still traveling on the road to another environment that will have crowd noise piped in.

Overall, though, the volume of the piped-in crowd noise won’t be the difference in this game. If the Buccaneers can get their offense running early-on, they’ll have a chance to compete and even come away with the road win.

However, it’s understandable that Vegas will favor the home team in this match-up, especially when the home team is a squad as talented as the Saints. They’re not considered Super Bowl favorites by many analysts for no reason.