The Buccaneers won Super Bowl LV and they have made the playoffs the last three seasons, but their recent history has not had any impact on predictions for this season.
Tom Brady was quarterbacking the Bucs during that run and he is now retired. Baker Mayfield is the team’s starting quarterback now and the outside view is that the Bucs are going to tumble down the standings this season.
Mayfield is fine with that. He noted that many “key pieces” of those Bucs teams are still in Tampa and believes that the narrative “that Tom’s gone and we suck” is good for the team because it creates a “different hunger” in those players.
“That’s fortunate for us, because that makes our guys have a different type of motivation they might have not had recently,” Mayfield said, via Rick Stroud of the Tampa Bay Times. “It puts them into a different level of competition and trying to prove that our locker room is more than capable of keeping that success.”
One game won’t tell the full story of the 2023 Buccaneers, but a strong performance in Minnesota this weekend would be a good sign that there’s life after Brady in Tampa.