Tampa Bay Buccaneers opponent preview for 2022 NFL season
By Rob Leeds
Buccaneers division opponents
Thank goodness the Bucs will get four games against two of the worst teams in the league. The Panthers and the Falcons are flat-out bad, and neither did anything to get better so far during the offseason.
The Falcons just lost their franchise quarterback and the Panthers still have the worst head coach-quarterback duos in the league.
We aren’t going to waste any time worrying about these teams as long as the Bucs don’t sleep through them.
We are going on a bit of a multi-year sweep against these opponents, and there is no reason this should change during 2022.
The Saints are a different story. While Tom Brady hasn’t lost to the Panthers or Falcons in a Bucs jersey, he also hasn’t beaten the Saints during the regular season.
That doesn’t really show a sign of dramatically changing. That team just seems to have Tom Brady’s number on defense, and the unit only got better this offseason.
The departure of Sean Payton should help Tampa, but the offense wasn’t what scared us in the first place.
The Bucs will need to play their best games of the season just to escape with a split, but let’s not start getting ahead of ourselves with the Saints after looking at the history of the matchup in the last few years.
Who cares. It’s their Super Bowl. The Bucs know that only comes in the post-season. But we can’t start predicting a change in this area until the Bucs show us something different.