Tampa Bay Buccaneers show championship mentality in victory vs. Carolina Panthers
The Tampa Bay Buccaneers didn’t win any hardware Sunday afternoon, but they still showed a clear championship mentality that shouldn’t be overlooked.
The Buccaneers entered a dangerous matchup Sunday afternoon with a hungry Carolina Panthers team looking to play spoiler as they were coming off a close loss to the Kansas City Chiefs from a week ago. From Tampa Bay’s perspective, the Bucs were coming off their worst loss of the year- a 38-3 beatdown delivered by the New Orleans Saints- and there were many coming into this believing that the Bucs would let that one loss turn into two.
It’s happened far too many times in the past.
The Buccaneers didn’t get off to the best after a Ronald Jones II fumble allowed the Panthers to get on the board first. Carolina would take a 14-7 lead into the second quarter and the two teams were tied at 17 apiece at halftime.
But that’s when everything changed for the Buccaneers
There are moments where teams have to decide whether they’re going to lay down and accept defeat or stand up and show a little fight. The Bucs, for the first time in quite a while, chose to enter the second half and take complete control of the game.
A Ryan Succop field goal and then a franchise-record 98-yard touchdown run by Ronald Jones II put the Bucs ahead 27-17. Succop would connect on two more field goals and then Tom Brady would score a touchdown and then hit Rob Gronkowski for another touchdown in the fourth quarter to give the Bucs a 46-23 victory.
It would’ve been really easy for the Buccaneers to throw in the towel and let last week’s loss turn into a second loss. There were plenty of Tampa Bay fans who were certainly fearing as much heading into this matchup, but they didn’t do that.
They came out, fought and came away with a big-time victory in a moment when they absolutely needed it.
You can scoff and talk about how ‘it’s only the Panthers’ and how ‘it doesn’t mean anything,’ but this team’s response to adversity has been unlike anything we’ve seen in the past decade and that’s what makes them different.