Buccaneers on brink of breakout season
Team made jump to 9-7 last season with Winston
Eleventh in a 13-part series on the opponents the Green Bay Packers will face during the 2017 regular season.
GREEN BAY - The term “rebuild” isn’t bandied about as much in the NFL as it is with professional basketball or baseball.
By nature, a rebuild denotes long-term progress. It is not a quick fix. In the NFL, where the annual playoff picture remains fluid, patience often isn’t required. Miss the postseason one year, there’s every chance you can find your way to January the next.
The Tampa Bay Buccaneers break from that mold. Theirs has been an incremental improvement.
From 2-14 in 2014, to 6-10 in 2015, to 9-7 and on the playoff fringe last season, perhaps no NFL team has followed the “rebuild” model as loyally as the Bucs during general manager Jason Licht’s three-year tenure.
After the franchise’s first winning season since 2010, the next step in the Bucs’ rebuild is clear.
Hungry for their first
postseason appearance in a decade — their record since 2007 is an abysmal 54-90 — there’s every chance the Bucs’ trip to Lambeau Field on Dec. 3 could carry major implications for both teams.
Here are three things to know about the Bucs.
Winston wins: The first priority for any franchise quarterback is to win football games, and 2015 top overall draft choice Jameis Winston has met that responsibility in his first two seasons. As a rookie, the Bucs improved their win total by four over the previous year. That total jumped three more last season. Winston has produced the numbers expected from a top quarterback, earning a Pro Bowl trip as a rookie and exceeding 4,000 passing yards in each of his first two seasons. His touchdown-to-interception ratio is a respectable 50-33 in his two seasons, an efficiency that should get only better with experience.
But the true measures of his value is how the Bucs have grown from a 2-14 bottom dweller in the year before Winston arrived to a legitimate playoff contender just two seasons later.
A QB’s best friend: In a league where few commodities are valued
more than a true No. 1 receiving threat, Mike Evans’ value is clear. At the age of just 23, Evans was selected to his first Pro Bowl last season. The 6foot-5, 231-pound receiver has exceeded 1,000 receiving yards in each of his three seasons, and finished with a career-high