Buccaneers: Time to set the goal for next season and start the dream

It’s time for the Buccaneers to refocus their sights.

Can’t say for everyone, but it’s time to stop thinking about all the bad that can happen in the next few months for the Buccaneers with contracts blazing, people moving around, and all sorts of MacGuffins that writers use to create some kind of storyline. So, let’s junk that stuff, and pretend instead that we are in search of the Holy Lombardi, hat tip to Monty Python.

What does it take to win a Super Bowl? Well, you need to start with good players, a solid team mentality, offense and, yes, defense, and a great leader, capable of tossing the trophy over troubled waters when necessary, or not.

Last season, Tampa Bay was able to pull all of that together. But other than having signed Tom Terrific TB12 Brady, who among us would have thought that all roads lead to the SB back in Tampa, a veritable home game? And in truth, despite all the ballyhooing from the pundits who didn’t know what to think when Brady signed, other than maybe he’s washed up, things did not look good at first. In fact, they didn’t look too good at second, third, fourth, or fifth.

Dropping that sloppy game to Chicago, and looking bad doing it, was hard to reconcile with a Lombardi trophy. The game looked a lot more like the ones that Warren Sapp and crew would wallow in and then suddenly hit a 55-yard field goal for the win. Sapp called it “Buc ball” or winning ugly, but this game was a vision of losing ugly.

Things started to get worse. The team bowed down to a horrid 7-5 record and were facing a gauntlet of games that sort of resembled that Chicago match-up. With a week to work things out, the team that rose from a would-be grave was something no one was really ready for.

No one, except maybe Tom Brady and Bruce Arians. Those two never lost their confidence that this was a good team. And good they were, ripping off, count ‘em, eight straight victories in order to snuggle up with a seven-pound, $50K, cuddle companion.

But with all that aside, the one thing that still rattles around Raymond James Stadium are six words spoken by Tom Brady: “We will be better next year.”