• There are eight teams left, and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers are one of them, without Tom Brady.
And after Monday night’s 32–9 beatdown of the defending conference champion Philadelphia Eagles, they can now say they’ve made it a round further in their first post–Brady year than they did in their final year with the greatest quarterback that ever played.
Pretty wild? Sure. But Tampa’s good now for the same reason Brady signed with the team in the first place, and that’s because the roster is still in really good shape, and there’s a good coaching staff. The difference this year versus the team that Dallas ousted in the wild-card round last year is in what all of us saw Sunday—one team looked loose and free, and played like it wanted to be there a lot more than its opponent did.
“That’s the energy that we’re having,” star receiver Chris Godwin told me from the locker room postgame. “Last year, we were playing really tight. I think that it showed. I think that this year, guys are playing free. Especially the last month, guys have been playing much more freely and just trying to have a good time. This game is such a special game. You don’t really know how much time you have in it. Go out there and let’s enjoy this s—.”
Godwin then summed it up like this: “We’re having fun playing football, and that’s going to be important for us moving forward.”
Indeed, the Bucs looked like a team playing with house money, and the result was a million-dollar performance, with a defense that owned the line of scrimmage against the Eagles’ vaunted offensive front (42 rush yards allowed, three sacks, tush push denied), a run game that was steady (119 yards without a single run over 12 yards), and the quarterback who replaced Brady playing (22-of-36, 337 yards, three TDs) a better game than the legend himself did in the same spot.
And in a way, that’s what Baker Mayfield’s teammates expected just in how the oft-doubted, repeatedly discarded quarterback fits in so well with a group of players that probably never got enough credit for how good the Bucs have been the past four years.
“He’s fit right in,” Godwin says. “The good thing about Baker is he didn’t come in trying to be Tom’s replacement. He came in just trying to be Baker Mayfield. That’s exactly who we needed him to be. We want him to be the best version of himself. His personality, the way he works, the way he interacts with guys, the guys can feel how genuine he is. He goes out there and he fights.
“He almost gets his head taken off on some plays. He takes some tough shots and gets banged up. But every time he gets back up and goes out there, you know that he’s going to keep fighting. Everybody on the team is that way. We have a group of fighters. Roll the ball out there and see what happens.”
And what happened Monday, in a lot of ways, was an explosion of all that’s gone right—including what Brady was able to supercharge with his arrival—over the last half-decade here.
That doesn’t mean the Bucs are going back to the Super Bowl. But it does mean they’re more of a threat to get there than most people thought.
“It wasn’t like the nucleus of the championship team wasn’t still here,” Godwin says. “It wasn’t like we didn’t have talented guys that worked their asses off. People were just writing us off from the beginning. Like we’ve been saying and preaching all year, last year, we came into the season, and people expected us to do a lot of things. You don’t win games on paper. You win them on the field. We just didn’t play well enough on the field last year. This year, same thing, but it flipped.
“People wrote us off in the beginning. We were like, . We know the games are played on the field.”
More than anything, the Bucs are playing like a group that appreciates being out there, and it showed Monday. And it should make them, to steal Mayfield’s word, pretty dangerous going forward.
