To say the most recent Tampa Bay Buccaneers season was the most disappointing in franchise history is some how still underselling things.
Fans have witnessed statistically worse seasons than what the 8-9 Bucs did last season, but it’s hard to argue that anything has been more soul crushing than watching a potential Super Bowl team disintegrate right before our very eyes.
If you went back in time and told Bucs fans in the mid-2010s that there would come a day when Tom Brady was leading the team, with two Pro Bowl-caliber wide receivers and a defense that ranked near the top of the league in back-to-back seasons, the first thought would be we finally pulled ourselves out of this hole.
That’s what made last season so tough. Despite everything, it felt like so many of the lost seasons when it absolutely shouldn’t have. Tom Brady is not Josh Freeman, yet Bucs fans found themselves with the same sinking feeling last season as they did so many years previous.
As the dust settles on what happened, everyone is searching for answer to the same question: What went wrong?
William Gholston tries to explain what went wrong for Buccaneers in 2022
William Gholston, who played in both eras Bucs fans just lived through, is trying to help provide at least some of that answer.
“We didn’t capitalize on our opportunities as much as we did in the years prior,” Gholston said in a recent interview with WDAE. “We had opportunities in our hands and we didn’t take it. We had games in our hands and we didn’t kill it with a sledgehammer — that type of mindset and mentality.”
It gets even more heartbreaking, as the Bucs seemed to have turned in a season that feels phoned in without actually doing that on their end.
“Every time we had the chance to practice we worked as hard as we could. We studied as hard as we could. We did everything that we needed to do except for those little details,” Gholston went on to say.
The answer Bucs fans are looking for will likely never come, and will be more along the lines of what Gholston explained. All season long a scapegoat was trying to be found, whether that was Todd Bowles or Byron Leftwich — the latter of whom was ultimately fired.
It would make the bitter pill of last season so much easier to swallow if there was some massive thing that caused things to go so far off the rails, but there isn’t. It was death by a million cuts, little things that added up in the end.
What makes that so frustrating is it’s nothing new for fans. No Bucs teams of years past began the season wanting to lose, yet the dumb mistakes and stupid errors all added up to lost seasons.
Not even having Tom Brady can make the team immune to the type of things that have sunk so many seasons before, and it’s a hard truth fans and those inside of locker room are going to have to live with.