Bucs Nation
We’ll conclude the offensive side of the team with the trenches.
We’ll conclude the offensive side of the Buccaneers’ all-quarter-century team with a breakdown of the team’s best(ish) offensive linemen of the last 25 years.
Let’s hear it for Fat Boy Friday.
There weren’t many constants in the late aughts and early 2010s for the Bucs, but Donald Penn served as one of them.
An undrafted free agent out of Utah State in 2006, Penn floated around the bottom of the roster for a year before earning 12 starts in 2007, which was enough to secure the long-term blindside spot. He proceeded to spend seven seasons with the Bucs and start 108 straight games, getting a Pro Bowl nod and even catching a couple touchdown passes on top of it.
Penn was never flashy, and he had a rough year or two, but he made up for it with nastiness, tenacity, and smarts. He played left tackle at a generally good-to-great level before the Bucs unceremoniously cut him in 2014 to replace him with Anthony Collins. We probably all remember how that went.
He proceeded to play six more quality seasons with the Raiders and Washington and earned more Pro Bowl nods before calling it quits in 2020.
Donovan Smith’s reputation among fans is polarizing, to put it nicely. Whether you hate him or, well, tolerate him, Smith started all 124 games he appeared in for Tampa after being drafted in the second round of the 2015 NFL Draft, which is remarkably consistent. The only games he missed came in the final season of his tenure in 2022.
While the beginning of Smith’s Bucs career saw him be way more of a turnstile than one would like, Smith started improving around 2018-19 and eventually fashioned an impressive stretch during the team’s competitive apex with Tom Brady – who definitely helped with his pocket awareness and quick trigger but nevertheless.
In the end, he was a good blindside protector for a championship-winning team and put in eight solid overall seasons, so he could’ve been much worse.
With Penn and Smith eating up 15 of the last 25 years, down-ballot candidates aren’t exactly awe-inspiring. So with that in mind, we’ll give some flowers to another player who built his career off unspectacular dependability.
Most of Roman Oben’s NFL tenure took place before joining the Bucs in 2002. A third-round pick in the 1996 draft, he played six years for the New York Giants and Cleveland Browns before the Bucs scooped him up on a one-year deal to displace former starter Kenyatta Walker, a first-round pick who struggled immensely as a rookie at left tackle the season prior and was getting kicked over to the right side.
With Oben’s veteran leadership, he helped galvanize a unit that struggled with running the ball under Jon Gruden’s new offensive scheme during the first part of the season....
