Although the Tampa Bay Buccaneers were everyone's darling team in the first half of the 2025 NFL regular season and getting shoutouts as a possible Super Bowl contender with Baker Mayfield wheeling and dealing under center as a bona fide MVP candidate, all that talk ultimately did the Bucs no good at all; Tampa collapsed in th second half of the season and did not even make the playoffs in the league's weakest division.
So the Bucs want to be back with a vengeance in 2026 after loading up with a new offensve coordinator, some huge draft prospcts like Ted Hurst and Rueben Bain Jr., and a few underrated gems in free agency like running back Kenny Gainwell and cerebral inside linebacker Alex Anzalone.
Yet the analysts in the mainstream are not quite giving the Buccaneers love, and perhaps after being burned badly by the Bucs in 2025, they are reticent to even consider the Bucs in the top half of all the teams in the NFL.
The Buccaneers are not ranked like a playoff team
In his post draft NFL Power Rankings, Sports Illustrated draft analyst and NFL expert Justin Melo, who is one of the most astute pundits in online media, did not seem overly impressed with the Buccaneers chances this season.
Melo only ranked the Bucs 18th in the NFL, though he did offer praise for Jason Licht's impressive draft class, “Baker Mayfield and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers could go their separate ways next offseason if 2026 is a disappointment; first-round pick Rueben Bain Jr. was arguably the biggest first-round steal, and Jason Licht did it again with Keionte Scott in the fourth round.”
It is a bit jarring that the Tampa Bay Buccaneers still are not considered a good football team despite having a great draft to right the wrongs of the last season, but the good news for the Bucs is that the NFC South is still terrible and the other teams in the division did not do as well in the offseason as Tampa Bay and Jason Licht did.
So in order to make the playoffs, the Bucs do not necessarily have to even be one of the top 14 teams in the NFL. Now, they should have more ambition than just to barely squeak by into the playoffs and be one and done again under Todd Bowles, but as Baker Mayfield will tell anyone first hand, these games are not played on paper either.
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