The Tampa Bay Buccaneers quietly and quickly have developed a quality team. And they’re a little bit pissed that folks generally haven’t noticed that yet.
Scott Reynold of PewterReport.com makes that point while laying out the reasons for the team’s decision to give up another home game in order to return to London. Reynolds writes that the franchise became “extremely frustrated” last year that none of its late-season games were not moved to Sunday night on NBC. “With potential playoff implications, even Tampa Bay’s season-ending contest at New Orleans was not flexed to primetime,” Reynolds says.
Right, but there was only one game in Week 17 that had actual playoff implications regardless of what happened earlier in the day: Rams at Seahawks. Though Bucs-Saints had potential playoff implications as the day began, there’s no guarantee that, by 8:20 p.m. ET, the game would have had any relevance.
Still, we like the fact that the Bucs are getting feisty. They want to be on Hard Knocks. They crave to be noticed. In some respects, they’re a watered-down version of the Jets, especially since they have a brash but likable head coach who generates great sound bites and who at one point last season declared his team to be the best in the NFC.
All that said, we don’t believe that playing in London equates to becoming one of the short-list glamor teams in the NFL. The London game, given the time differences, gets lumped into the 1:00 p.m. ET contests on a Sunday in late October. While it may be a big deal in England, there’s really nothing special about the game in the eyes of the average NFL fans.
If the Bucs want attention, the best thing they can do is to keep winning games. And to get to the playoffs. And to advance in the playoffs. And to get to the Super Bowl. And to win it.
Until that happens, they’ll receive precisely the attention they deserve -- that of a good team that wasn’t good enough to make it to the postseason.