Buccaneers: Great injury news improves season outlook

The dominos are finally falling for the Buccaneers to get key players back.

The Buccaneers are a great NFL team. At 6-2 going into the bye, Tampa is in a great position to make some noise in the playoffs, but staying happy with being 6-2 without bringing up some of the shortcomings of this team ignores where the ceiling is.

This team has every bit of talent to be one of the most successful in NFL history. A wildly successful offense mixed with a defense that shut down Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs under the direction of a great coaching staff set extremely high expectations for this season.

In some ways, the Bucs have met these expectations, but they have fallen short in others. Injuries make it very hard to judge this team accurately, but because these are just a part of the game, we still have to evaluate how ready this current team is for the playoffs.

As it stands, the Buccaneers are in a position to make noise in the playoffs, but this team has struggled when the competition was playoff-caliber. This is not a sweeping indictment against this team due to rampant injuries, but dropping games against two of three teams that are over .500 is some cause for concern.

Tampa is great at beating bad teams right now, but they struggle against the teams with any level of competence. The Cowboys game could have easily been a loss if they could kick, a terrible Bill Belichick decision cost the Pats a win against their former quarterback, the Saints beat the Bucs with a backup quarterback, and the Rams were in control of their game the whole time.

The Buccaneers did win two of these games in the end, so the ifs and buts don’t matter in the long run, but there are still some questions about the Super Bowl viability of a team so plagued with injuries.

Fortunately, the Bucs are going to start seeing a lot more familiar faces on the field in the coming weeks.

The Buccaneers announced yesterday that Scotty Miller and Sean Murphy-Bunting are close to coming off IR. The Bucs need SMB badly, and Miller would also be a welcomed return to the offense, but the defense is still the area that needs the most help.

Having Jamel Dean, Murphy-Bunting, and Richard Sherman as the starting corners would be a breath of fresh air after some of the defensive breakdowns we’ve seen this season, and hopefully, Carlton Davis will also make his return soon as well.

This is great news for a Bucs team that needed all they could get during the bye. There is enough time here to get both Miller and SMB up to speed to start in two weeks, and the results against these better teams should start to change as Tampa gets more of their key players back.

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