How to Fix the Buccaneers
The NFL offseason is now in full swing with coaching changes, free agency and the NFL Draft reshaping the 2023 fantasy football landscape. With that in mind, the Fantasy Life squad is breaking down every NFL team to determine what went wrong in 2022 and identify paths to improvement. Let's hear from Geoff about the next team on the list, the Buccaneers.
Team Summary
The Buccaneers of 2022-23 were an aging team trying to hold onto one more shot at glory. They failed miserably and now will enter 2023-24 in the midst of an identity crisis with aging veterans hogging up valuable cap space the team could use to rebuild.
Tampa Bay ended last season with some polarizing splits on offense. Former OC Byron Leftwich continued with Bruce Arians aerial style attack, and it saw Tampa Bay lead the league in pass play percentage. Unfortunately, the stubbornness did not lead to the same efficiency and success that Tampa enjoyed under Arians.
For 2022-23 the Buccaneers ranked
- 25th in yards per pass attempt
- 20th in EPA per play on offense
- 14th in pass plays of 20+ yards / 16th in pass plays of 40+ yards
The Buccaneers were also an abject disaster running the ball. While the team remained respectable under Arians in this regard – ranking out 5th in offensive rush DVOA in 2021 – they regressed horribly in 2022 under Bowles.
Tampa was 30th in offensive rush DVOA in 2022 and ranked last in yards per carry, rush yards per game, and rushing TDs per game.
We’re supposed to use this space to highlight some notable fantasy performers, but nobody from Tampa finished in the top 10 at their position in any format last season.
Tom Brady is gone, and Mike Evans is coming off his least efficient season in over four years. Evans scored half of his six receiving TDs in a Week 17 game against the Panthers and was otherwise a massive bust for fantasy managers who selected him in the second round.
The Buccaneers will need a lot of things to roll in their favor if they are to experience success in 2023-24.
There are some interesting fantasy prospects on the roster with both Rachaad White and Cade Otton coming off solid rookie years, but the team enters with a ton of question marks – most notably at quarterback, where Kyle Trask is currently listed atop the depth chart.
New offensive coordinator Dave Canales will have his work cut out for him and need to work the same magic with Trask that he did with Geno Smith last season. The team’s cap space will likely mean the Buccaneers don’t make a huge splash in free agency and will have to shore up their depth chart with savvy drafting.
Tough decisions are ahead for this once dominate NFC powerhouse.
Fantasy Fixer Recommendations
Get some Trask Insurance
As of writing, Kyle Trask is the only quarterback under contract for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
To say that Trask enters this season with a lot of question marks is an understatement. His only professional experience over the last two seasons came in a meaningless Week 18 game last season against the Falcons:
Trask is a hulking pocket quarterback at 6’5 235 lbs who threw for 43 TDs in his last year of college. Trask has some potential but needs the right environment to succeed.
He’s ultimately a one-dimensional player whose biggest weakness as a pro will be his inability to improvise or help out his offensive line against good pass rushes.
Trask also feels like the type of player who will get absolutely cooked behind a Tampa Bay offensive line that lost numerous players last off-season and has been propped up somewhat in the pass protection categories by the quick release of Tom Brady.
The Buccaneers currently have all of their first three picks in the 2023 NFL draft intact and also have multiple picks in the later rounds:
- Round 1, Pick 19
- Round 2, Pick 50
- Round 3, Pick 82
- Round 5, Pick 155
- Round 5, Pick 175
- Round 6, Pick 181
- Round 6, Pick 196
- Round 7, Pick 232
- Round 7, Pick 253
Making a run at one of the top four quarterbacks in the draft will be difficult, but Tampa Bay at least has the capital to try. Former Florida Gator Anthony Richardson recently made a splash with his metrics at the combine:
Richardson’s mobility in the pocket and red zone rushing ability would give the Buccaneers a completely different dynamic to work with should the Trask experiment fail.
Whether Tampa makes a run at Richardson, they’ll need to add depth at quarterback. Trask could work out, but his player profile is definitely not what you’d call ideal for the modern NFL game.
Tampa Bay needs some fallback options and would be wise to reinvest at quarterback in the draft.
Cut Leonard Fournette & let Rachaad White cook
The Buccaneers are mired in cap hell.
They now sit $55 million over the projected 2023 salary cap of $225 million, without any room to resign their core players.
Long story short, the Buccaneers need to get busy making some tough decisions, and it should begin with looking to release underproducing and overpaid veterans.
Cutting Leonard Fournette will save the Buccaneers 3.5 million dollars in cap space, and given how putrid the Bucs were at running the ball last season, getting rid of him really shouldn’t be a tough decision.
Fournette averaged 3.5 yards per carry last season and posted a career-low 1.5 yards after contact. Rookie Rachaad White wasn’t exceptional on the ground either, but he still managed to out-produce Fournette in efficiency:
White was also the better player down the stretch and outproduced Fournette in the Bucs' playoff game. White played on 56% of the snaps in the wildcard card round and ended the loss to Dallas with 7 carries and 41 rush yards, compared to 5 carries and 11 yards for Fournette.
Yes, the Buccaneers will lose some reliability with Fournette, who was excellent as a pass catcher, hauling in 73 of his 83 targets for 7.2 yards per catch.
However, White has already proven he can be solid in that role, catching 50 passes in his rookie season with a similar catch rate to Fournette.
Tampa Bay was last in pretty much every rushing metric last season and had just three rushes of 20+ yards – and zero rushes of 40+ yards.
They’d do well to release Fournette, give the starting job to White, and then look to reinvest in some speed later in the draft. Keaton Mitchell would be an excellent fit, as he had nine rushes of 15+ yards last season in college and could be available into day three of the draft.
Reinvest in the WR position
The Buccaneers have to make some tough choices at WR this offseason, as Mike Evans and Chris Godwin both showed severe signs of regression last season.
Evans saw his catch rate in 2022-23 fall by over 4% over the previous year and he ranked just 56th in open rate (per ESPN analytics) after ranking 19th in that same category the season prior. Evans has a $23,698,500 cap hit for next season, but his dead cap space hit would fall to $9,198,500 if they cut him after June 1, 2023.
On first inspection, Godwin’s case looks even direr. He struggled to a 5.7 aDOT and produced just a 97.2 passer rating when targeted. This number slipped under 100.0 for a season for the first time in his career.
Godwin is the younger of the two players at 27 years of age, and considering he was less than a year removed from an ACL injury for most of 2022-23, there’s reasonable optimism that he will bounce back.
New OC Dave Canales (who was quarterback coach in Seattle) was able to help extract significant performances from both Tyler Lockett and DK Metcalf, giving hope that we’ll see more explosive plays from Godwin next season as well.
Despite Evans’ cap hit, Tampa Bay seems likely to keep both their top WRs for the new season, but they’d still do well to go after some new talent in the draft – which would at least give them some options as they approach June 1.
Jalin Hyatt is a potential day-two draft pick with solid combine metrics and would add some much-needed explosiveness to the Buccaneers' attack next season.
Whether it be Evans’ cap hit/declining skills or Godwin’s injury history, Tampa Bay is starting to erode at this position. Whichever way the Buccaneers decide to go on Evans, it’s evident that injecting some youthful speed into the offense through the draft would likely be beneficial for 2023-24.
