Without playing a single snap on Sunday, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers ended up being one of the biggest winners of the weekend.
It was all thanks to a fantastic slew of outcomes that bounced the Bucs' way:
- Green Bay lost in an upset to Carolina
- Detroit lost at home to Minnesota
- Atlanta lost its fifth game of the season, this time to New England
The Packers losing was the most significant result, as it shifted the entire NFC playoff picture. Philadelphia owns a head-to-head tiebreaker over the Bucs, which is why the Eagles now own the No. 1 seed but Tampa Bay is right there behind them in second place.
Buccaneers come out of Week 9 big winners, despite being on a bye
Seattle dominated Washington but can't move past the Bucs thanks to Tampa Bay owning the tiebreaker there, which means the Packers dropped all the way down to the No. 4 seed after getting upset by Carolina.
That's fantastic news coupled with something even better: Tampa Bay got a chance to get healthy.
Injuries have hampered the team all season, but guys like Bucky Irving, Chris Godwin, and Luke Goedeke got an extra week to rest up and hopefully be healthy enough to return for a brutal upcoming stretch on the schedule.
Week | Opponent | Date/Time (TV) |
|---|---|---|
10 | vs. New England Patriots | Nov 9th, 1 pm ET (CBS) |
11 | at Buffalo Bills | Nov. 16th, 1 pm ET (CBS) |
12 | at Los Angeles Rams | Nov. 23rd, 8:20 pm ET (NBC) |
Right now Tampa Bay doesn't have to worry too much about the NFC South, but the Falcons blowing another game means Atlanta is pretty much on life support halfway through the season. All of the conversation is about whether Raheem Morris will get fired and not at all on how the Falcons can catch the Bucs -- which seems incredibly unlikely after Atlanta dropped to 3-5 and a full four games behind Tampa Bay (thanks to yet another tiebreaker).
The team the Bucs should keep an eye on is Carolina, as the Panthers are now 5-4 and look a lot more serious than they have this entire decade. The Panthers have historically been a hard out for the Bucs, and this year's version is legimately talented and can't be taken lightly.
With that said, the Bucs don't play the Panthers until late December when the landscape could look a lot different. Theoretically any matchup against Carolina shouldn't be that big of a deal since the Bucs should be in a great spot when we reach that part of the calendar.
What can't happen is Tampa Bay slipping into another midseason coma, which we've seem the team do in each of the last two seasons. Injuries have piled up in a way that suggests the difficulty of his upcoming stretch could throw things off track, but this season has been defined by subverted expectations.
Games against the Patriots, Bills, and Rams will test the Bucs and we're about to learn a lot about whether the breaks the team got this weekend end up mattering much in the long run.