The Bucs After Brady

Every team needs some luck in the playoffs, the Bucs got a huge measure of it. They got the easiest matchup in the wildcard round (and nearly blew it), played Brees on a historically bad day, and destroyed KC's beat-up OL in the SB. I've watched that 2nd quarter several times, and there were 2-3 bad calls. I just don't see a trip on Evans at all, and only incidental contact on the Int overturned by holding, which for me was a critical call in the game. There's clear evidence that those calls messed with the KC defense mindset, judging by the mic'd up comments. The Bucs also got help from opposing teams: poor clock management, poor gameplans (KC never adjusted to help Mahomes buy time to throw in the SB), poor situational play, crucial dropped catches and Int opportunities.

The Bucs have been a heavily penalized team for a decade: a lot of that was undisciplined play by the team. It really only turned around this year after the debacle up in Chicago, after that they really tightened up. But I don't buy the conspiracy narrative, the most help we got was other teams shooting themselves in the foot and us making plays when we needed to.


My reasoning for a fix is that what a great storyline it makes for selling the audience to watch
the Super Bowl (which according to the audience numbers reporting were far down},
storyline makes a great sell for, "the next great quarterback in the NFL versus the current G.O.A.T".
And no amount of selling the NFL, and CBS could muster helped the audience numbers. They were woeful.
Just awful, as it has been all year.

Goodell better think of something quick to get viewer numbers up because the NFL will need it to convince the networks to
bid up billions of dollars. The only way the owners have survived this year is because of their revenue sharing from
the billions made from the network dollars guarantees. The owners have gone bankrupt by the loss of
their billions $$$ otherwise.