The Falcoholic
The season is upon us. The Atlanta Falcons nearly made the playoffs a year ago in part because they beat the Tampa Bay Buccaneers twice, and any playoff push this season will have to feature a win or two against a team that has been annoyingly good at winning the NFC South in recent years. There’s no time like Week 1 to leave a bruise on the Bucs.
We’ve discussed the need for a fast start multiple times throughout the summer, but it’s just as important as it was a year ago to stack a few wins early. The Buccaneers, Panthers, Vikings, Bills, and Commanders are all on tap in the first six weeks—the Falcons also have a bye—and coming out of that at 3-2 or better would set Atlanta up for a tremendous season. Getting by the Bucs means surviving a shootout, in all likelihood, given that these two teams have played one-score games in each of their past six matchups, and both games last year saw the Falcons score over 30 points en route to victory.
A quick programming note: Generally I’d use rankings here as the first section, but the Falcons and Bucs haven’t played at all yet, and both teams are different enough from last year’s edition that I don’t know that it really serves us to carry 2024 statistics over. We’ll instead focus on how the Buccaneers have changed and what to expect Sunday.
It’s still Todd Bowles, Baker Mayfield, and the bones of the successful Bucs teams of yesteryear. Chris Godwin is back—though he won’t be available in Week 1—and so is Lavonte David, keeping two franchise greats around.
A team that’s loaded up with veteran contracts and trying to keep winning, as Tampa Bay is, does not necessarily have a lot of wiggle room with the cap. That proved true in 2025, where the team made a splash with Haason Reddick, the veteran pass rusher who dug in for a holdout last year but had been consistently productive in the years before that, and their second biggest signing was…Riley Dixon? A punter?
Their only other additions in free agency worth mentioning were depth-based, replacing Kyle Trask with the far better and more experience Teddy Bridgewater as Baker Mayfield’s backup. But keeping around Godwin and David, plus guard Ben Bredeson, should help them keep continuity and a high level of play, assuming those first two in particular are healthy through most of 2025.
The draft was where they really looked to make some noise, and their class was once again adored by draft analysts. Wide receiver Emeka Egbuka is a potentially elite slot receiver who will be asked to carry a heavy load early with Godwin not quite back and Jalen McMillan on the shelf, and a player the Bucs loved enough as one of their top options over the long haul to select him 19th overall. Benjamin Morrison dropped because of injury and hasn’t practiced in a...
