4 observations from Buccaneers 2023 schedule

Now that the Tampa Bay Buccaneers schedule has been released, it’s time to pick it apart and sort out a few observations we have.

Is it the unofficial start of the season or the end of the first offseason wave? Whatever you want to call it, the NFL Schedule has been released and we can now spend the next few months picking apart every Tampa Bay Buccaneers game as we all attempt to determine how the season will go before it even happens.

Just like how we overanalyze draft picks the moment their name is read off a card, the schedule release doesn’t mean much until the games are actually played. How many people looked at the Cincinnati Bengals schedule in 2021 and thought they’d be playing in the Super Bowl that year? Think about all of the teams who are dubbed Super Bowl favorites in May but are already out of contention by Halloween.

That range seems to be where everyone thinks the Buccaneers will be this year, as experts were already predicting a Top 5 draft pick for the team before the latest draft class could even settle in. Nobody seems to think the Bucs will be competitive this season, let alone be any good, but the schedule release gives us our first look at how accurate these knee-jerk predictions will end up being.

Again, the games need to be played before judgment is actually passed, but there are a few things that are already sticking out as potentially notable factors.

Observation 1: There are more wins on the schedule than experts think

Let’s dive right into this one because it’s somewhat of a talking point with the national pundits. Everyone knew expectations for the Bucs would shift once Tom Brady left but the reaction from folks like Peter King and others has been pretty harsh.

King took less time than it takes to pronounce the team’s name to write them off in his post-NFL Draft power ranking. He deemed them the second-worst team in the league, which is a weird hot take for a guy who is usually on top of his game.

Nobody thinks the Bucs are going to win the Super Bowl this year without many things going their way, but to think that a team with Mike Evans, Chris Godwin, Vita Vea, Antoine Winfield Jr., and even Baker Mayfield is the second-worst team in the league is horribly misguided. This isn’t to say the Bucs are a top-tier team, but both the talent on paper and a look at their schedule reveals a brighter outlook than what is being painted.

Realistically the Bucs are in the six-win range, with a serious chance of winning fewer than that and landing at the top of next year’s NFL Draft. There are potentially more than six wins on their schedule, especially if the team plays up to its level or overachieves.

It’s very likely that they split with each NFC South team, which gets them halfway to the three-win total before considering very winnable games against the Colts and Texans. That gets the Bucs to five wins, with games against the Titans, Lions, and Bears that the team should be able to win if they don’t beat themselves.

Looking at the schedule that way, we’re at as many as eight wins, with the Vikings and Packers both being beatable this year.

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves and call a Tom Brady-less Bucs team a 10-plus win team but there are more ways the team wins over 6 games than it loses fewer.