While the Tampa Bay Buccaneers are 3-1, they'd be undefeated if wins and losses were tallied by the number of injured players a team has.
Tampa Bay's locker room has turned into a MASH unit this season; Cody Mauch and Calijah Kancey are on IR, Mike Evans and Luke Geodeke are out indefinitely, and both Baker Mayfield and Emeka Egbuka have shown up on the injury report.
It's not all bad news, as last week was the first action that Chris Godwin and Tristan Wirfs saw this year, but the last thing the Bucs need is an injury to another key player. That's the anxiety everyone in Tampa is living with as we all await the status of star running back Bucky Irving for Week 5.
Not much in the way of specific injury updates from Bowles today -- he acknowledged he's concerned at corner, where Jamel Dean and Benjamin Morrison both left the game with injuries, and he said Bucky Irving is among the players dealing with injuries.
— Greg Auman (@gregauman) September 29, 2025
When asked about Irving's status ahead of getting an MRI, Bowles said that he was 'concerned,' which is precisely the opposite of what Bucs fans want to hear.
Something simliar happened last year with Antoine Winfield Jr., where his injury seemed to pop up quietly before snowballing into a season-long thing that knocked him out of mulitple games. That's obviously the worst-case scenario here but such a thing would be devestating to an already thin Bucs roster.
Buccaneers losing Bucky Irving would sting, but it's not a fatal blow
Losing Bucky would remove an absolutely critical piece of the offense, and make life even harder than it already has been. He helped power comeback wins in the first three weeks of the season and his 72-yard touchdown last Sunday against the Eagles nearly made it four in a row.
The good news is that if Irving needs to miss time, the Bucs can replace him with Rachaad White and feel good about how that might go. He's not Irving, but White is more of a RB1-B than a RB2, which takes a little bit and keeps it from being a potentially fatal blow.
White has carried the backfield load before, and he'd be able to provide some life in the passing game the same way we've seen Josh Grizzard use Irving so far this season. It wouldn't be as dynamic of an offense but it wouldn't be something that totally derails the season.
However, we're reaching a death by a million cuts with the Bucs. Losing Irving isn't fatal in a vacuum, but combined with the loss of Evans, Mauch, Goedeke, and others, it starts to add up.
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