Antoine Winfield Jr. missing 'several weeks' with a knee injury is a total gut punch for the Bucs
By Josh Hill
It's hard to gauge how we should all feel about what happened in Week 14 for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. On the one hand, the team strung together its third-straight win and wrestled back control of the the NFC South. After falling into a four game losing streak before the bye week, the Bucs are in first place again and control their own destiny down the stretch of the season.
That's a path that won't be easy to walk, though.
While the Bucs got a win, it was an ugly one that saw Baker Mayfield turn the ball over three times. Defending a short field like they did against the Panthers a week ago, Tampa Bay's defense looked less than stellar against a vastly inferior opponent.
Perhaps the biggest loss was the quietest of the afternoon. Antoine Winfield Jr. left the game before halftime with what was diagnosed as a knee injury, and the news continues to get worse the more we hear about it.
Antoine Winfield Jr. expected to miss multiple games due to injury, again
Todd Bowles delivered some truly bad news on Monday, as Winfield is expected to miss 'several weeks' with the knee injury he suffered in the win over Las Vegas.
It's impossibly bad timing, not that there's ever a good time for a team to lose an All-Pro and one of its best players. Winfield has been battling injuries all season, much like the rest of the roster, and hasn't looked right since returning earlier in the year.
He left Week 1's win over the Commanders with a foot injury that ended up snowballing into him missing four games. Winfield returned for the blowout win over the Saints in Week 6 but hasn't seemed 100 percent and is now once again going to miss time.
Losing Winfield now is a crushing blow to an already depleted defense that is running on fumes while being held together by duct tape and bubblegum. Tampa Bay is already down two safeties with Jordan Whitehead on IR and Mike Edwards dealing with a hamstring, and the latest bad break with Winfield is hard to overstate.
The Bucs have four games left and zero margin for error if they want to make it back to the playoffs. Winfield hasn't been ruled out for the season, which is at least positive in that he might return to the team if they reach the postseason, but missing 'several weeks' with only a few left on the schedule isn't ideal.
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