Tampa Bay Buccaneers nose tackle Vita Vea is one of the best in the business, but no matter how many years he has been operating at the highest possible level or what he has done for the Bucs organization with a Super Bowl ring to his name, it still feels like this massive mountain of a defensive lineman is still forever underrated by the masses.
ESPN continued their annual poll of NFL executives, coaches, scouts, and other league personnel to rank the top 10 players at every position, and one of the biggest snubs was Vea. After making the list of best defensive tackles in ninth last year in 2025, which still felt like it was underrating him, the Buccaneers star did not even make the top 10 at all.
Jeremy Fowler, the man in charge of putting the top 10s together, wrote a brief explanation of why Vea did not make the cut this year, and Buccaneers fans are not going to be convinced at all by the reasoning.
Vita Vea will be back with a vengeance
The ESPN NFL insider wrote on Vita Vea, "Vea is still widely feared as one of the league's best nose tackles, but the 31-year-old's pressure numbers have fallen, and he was not one of the top 10 run-stopping DTs in ESPN's run stop win rate."
Run stop win rate is a pretty terrible way to measure up a nose tackle to the other defensive tackles, because so much of Vea's job is about taking on multiple offensive linemen so that the linebackers or safeties can make the tackle.
The other thing about his pressure numbers falling is that Vea has to carry so much of the pass rushing load due to the lack of talent around him, and when he does get pressure, it is the kind of pressure that forces incompletions and totally disrputs the play.
Vea's ranking falling is a classic case of people who should know better about how football works downgrading an amazing player who was as good as ever just because the team around him was terrible. Clearly, Vea is paying for the sins of an awful edge rusher, poor defensive line play around him, and inside linebacker corps that badly fell off with Lavonte David declining and playing hurt in his final NFL season.
Next season, with Rueben Bain Jr., Alex Anzalone, A'Shawn Robinson, Josiah Trotter, and a couple of others joining the defense to help out, Vea will be back with a vengeance.
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