We now know the Tampa Bay Buccaneers schedule for this upcoming season, but when it was released on Wednesday, a big game was missing.
Earlier in the week it had been teased that the Bucs would be playing on Thanksgiving, something that has only happened once in the history of the franchise. Celebrating Tampa Bay's 50th season by getting some love on one of the league's biggest days seemed like a cool thing that made sense, but it wasn't meant to be.
As it turns out, folks who leaked that game early misread the schedule and thought that the team's Week 12 matchup against the Los Angeles Rams, a primetime game on NBC, was the third game on Thanksgiving.
Thankfully that turned out to be false, which is phenomenal news in hindsight.
Now that we know the schedule, that game would have been perhaps the worst on Tampa Bay's schedule. It comes in the middle of a travel gauntlet, one that sees the team travel coast to coast and back again without rest over three weeks.
That's brutal enough, but having to add in a short week to all of that travel would have been potentially devestating.
Had the game been on Thanksgiving, the Bucs would have needed to travel over 2,500 miles from Buffalo to Los Angeles between Sunday afternoon and Thursday evening. Essentially, there would have been zero time to get back to Tampa Bay for practice before heading out west, which means the Bucs would have needed to go straight to California for the most efficient travel.
When the schedule was released, however, the Rams game was the Sunday before Thanksgiving with the Bucs traveling home to face the Arizona Cardinals the week after.
That's a much more ideal schedule, although it's still not great. We've seen the Bucs tested in the middle of the season under less dire travel circumstances, which means we'll be in for a white-knuckle ride when November rolls around.
Thankfully it's not has bad as it could have been.
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