Evans: 56 catches, 957 yards, 135 FP
Brown: 62 catches, 807 yards, 152 FP
Consecutive Games with a TD
Evans 1
Brown 8
The 17-point disparity doesn’t feel like anything when you consider Brown has scored in 9 of 10 games, compared to Evans scoring in just 5 of 10. The real disappointment is that Cameron has three WRs outscoring Evans on the year. The only non-QB outscoring Evans on my team is the Bears D.
Ohhh, the Bucs, what will we do? Our playoff hopes ended against the Giants, which seems to happen every year we play the Giants. But, if there is a bright side, we outscored the Giants 28-14 after Jameis entered the game. The dark side is the laziness of sports punditry. I live in a place where people don’t follow Florida sports. At all. Just on Thursday, I had to correct someone who thought Dan Marino led the Dolphins undefeated season and someone else who thought Rashard Lewis signed his max contract back in the day with the Heat. So I field the question pretty regularly: what are the Bucs going to do with Jameis Winston? I know we already know this, but it’s bares emphasizing: Jameis Winston is going to start at QB next year and many years after that.
Why wouldn’t this happen? Maybe because Jameis leads the league in turnovers. But that’s the end of the list. The lazy sports pundits would tie this into his poor decision-making in general and cite the suspension as further evidence, as if he committed the crime this summer when really he has stayed clean for almost three years. I get that we’re not handing out medals in this country for people not being trash, but among rural Alabmans living in Florida, Jameis is a relatively model citizen. With his pedigree, he deserves some praise for being at least average, mentally and morally.
Does that mean we should give him money? Sure! We’re not recruiting any Drew Breeses in free agency, nor are we likely to hit on anyone better than Jameis in any draft. They don’t make them better than Jameis. Cite your Goffs and Mahomeses and Wentzes all you want. Cite Aaron Rodgers and Baker Mayfield. Only Rodgers thrives independent of brilliant coaching. If Jameis were playing for San Francisco, he would be an MVP candidate. If he had just begun the season as our starting QB, he would be an MVP candidate. His numbers with a shitty playcaller put him on pace to break the all-time yards record. This would be like panning DeAndre Hopkins back when he didn’t have a QB. The pieces are not in place. We have ten to fifteen years of physically capable Jameis to get the pieces in place. Why would we start from scratch? I mean, okay I have on idea of why we would do it:
We hire Lincoln Riley, and Kyler Murray declares for the draft. This is the one scenario in which I’d say, okay, I’m taking my Jameis jersey to Plato’s Closet. But even if we hired Lincoln Riley, we could keep Jameis and get similar production. QBs produce what their offensive systems dictate they produce, except for Aaron Rodgers. The only exception is when the QB doesn’t fit the system, or rather, the system doesn’t fit the QB.
This is the year that proves that adapting a system to the QB improves the offense, no matter what. Look what the Bills did with Matt Barkley! By just having competent coaches, most of the league is able to compete. I can only see three teams who aren’t adapting to this trend, maybe four: the Jets, the Raiders, the Jags, and maybe the Broncos. Oh, and the Redskins, but the curse kind of omits them from mattering in any context. They’ve had literally all of their starters on offense get injured, with Morgan Moses and Jordan Reed the only two to avoid missing games due to injuries. And they’re 6-4, so their coaches must be pretty good. Hue Jackson would be 0-10 with that many excuses to lean on. But Doak, you didn’t mention the Titans, Bills, and Cards, literally the three worst offenses in the league. These three teams are on the up-swing, though. Well, to be fair, the Titans are just swinging in every direction. But anyway, I think the Bills are figuring it out, and the Cardinals already have.
Somehow, this all means that Jameis is worth re-signing for big money and starting for the foreseeable future, I assure you. The bigger question is what to do with the coaching staff. Brian and I agree we should just bring back the offensive brain-trust. The problem with this team is on defense, and a new head coach won’t fix it. In fact, even a new defensive coordinator won’t fix it. The issue with the Bucs defense is simple: we lack depth. When guys get hurt, we don’t have spare bodies to fill in for them. When Hargreaves got hurt, we were stuck choosing between two mid-round rookies. Then when the rookies got hurt, we immediately had to sub in our special teams captain and a guy from the practice squad. We were starting Chris Conte when we had DJ Swearinger! If there is an issue coaching can solve, it’s the old problem of self-scouting. Who are our good players, and are they on the field? Just look at Cleveland’s RB situation. It was a classic scouting problem. The coaches saw Hyde as “the guy” because he could “do it all,” when they had two players who, as two halves, made up a significantly better whole.
Bring it back to the Bucs, Doak, come on.
Just a few months ago, the Bucs made some interesting moves in the attempt to win now. They signed two key defensive linemen away from the Eagles in Vinny Curry and Beau Allen. They traded for a premiere pass-rusher in JPP. They hired former Cardinals DL coach Brenston Buckner. They drafted Vita Vea. The question was posed, can a team build a defensive line in one offseason? The results have been mixed.
JPP is what he is advertised to be. He is the only defender to start every game, and he leads the defense with a very respectable 9.5 sacks (8th in the league and as many as the next two Bucs combined).
Curry has been injured, playing just six of the team’s ten games and probably losing his job to Carl Nassib in that time.
Nassib wasn’t even part of the plan. Cleveland cut him, we scooped him, and he’s go 4.5 sacks in his four starts for Curry. He’s also forced a couple fumbles and performed a sick pass breakup.
Beau Allen has played eight of ten games, mostly taking up room. He’s been spotted looking a fool on many of the misdirection plays plaguing this defense. Somehow he has held off Vita Vea.
Vea apparently does very little in his opportunities. I’ve seen him get swallowed up in the middle on just about every play. He has three tackles in seven games, but hey, the most recent one was a sack (two weeks ago). I believe his specialty is pass-rush, which is stupid since he’s 350 pounds.
There is one nice thing about this defensive line. After this season ends, we don’t owe anyone any money except for Vea. I know it’s hard to believe, but check the contracts if you don’t believe me. Even Gerald McCoy’s guaranteed money is up after this year. In fact, do you want to know just how much the Bucs were in win NOW mode? Just twelve players on the roster are guaranteed contracts in excess of 500K going into next year: Evans (both), Jensen, Marpet, Howard, Hargreaves, and this year’s rookies. Even Lavonte’s salary is unguaranteed for the next two years.
Theoretically, the Bucs can do whatever the fuck they want.
Realistically, the defense will lose Curry, Gholston, Grimes, and Conte. Nassib will take Curry’s spot, re-signing for about what Gholston makes. We will go fishing for safety help and hopefully trade for Jalen Ramsey to take Grimes’ spot.
The offense will lose DeSean Jackson unless Jameis targets him ten times a game and connects on the majority of deep balls. It’s possible. We don’t have a replacement for Jackson waiting in the wings, so it would be nice to see him stay, even though he’s expensive. We don’t need the money since we’re no longer signing free agents to multi-year deals.
In the draft, we won’t have our first pick since it will go to Jacksonville for Ramsey. I want to be clear about something: I don’t support multi-year free agent deals, but I support trading for guys and then signing them. There’s a huge difference between players held for trade value and players allowed to hit free agency. Anyway, the leaves us six picks to draft a ball-hawk safety, a speed-size edge rusher who can play LB or DE, a burner receiver, two offensive linemen, and a pass-catching back. Actually, scratch the pass-catching back. Let’s have Humphries take that job over for good. Let’s have that last one be another defensive back.
I’m so excited for next year. If Brees retires, we could have a shot.
(Brees is definitely retiring, right? If he gets the all-time yards record, TD record, his first MVP, and he wins the Super Bowl—all of which are likely to happen—then he has to walk off on top, doesn’t he?)
Anyway, the Bucs can still go 9-7, and I’m rooting for them to do so. I know I’m supposed to root for a high draft pick, but if we can learn one thing from the Patriots, it’s that winning games is better than drafting near the top. It’s also important to have momentum and a winning mentality. I remember Jamal Adams got in trouble earlier this year for criticizing last year’s Jets on account that they behaved like losers. A popular criticism of Hue Jackson is that he has a loser’s mentality, which is why he makes so many excuses for not winning. Bill Belichick once said that he doesn’t have losers in his locker room. He’s fine with one, but he says that if there’s more than one, they find each other a form a little loser’s circle together and bring down the team. I wish I could remember where I read that because it was such an amazing insight yet the phrasing of it is so frowned on in society at-large. “I don’t like losers.” I tried to find the source on this, but now I think I heard it on a podcast. Anyway, that’s what I want from the Bucs going forward. I want to win and I want it to not be okay if we lose. For example: the Giants game. It was totally unacceptable that we lost. It is unacceptable to lose to Nick Mullens and the 49ers, especially with Garcon and Goodwin missing the game. It’s a creative offense that’s going to move the ball down the field, but it’s reasonable to assume we can stop them inside the ten and force some field goals. All we need to do is blitz. We should probably blitz the whole game just to keep the kid from getting in any rhythm. I can call young players kids now that I’m almost 30.
As for our league, I’m too afraid to talk about anything even tangential to my playoff odds this week. Suffice it to say that Tim has probably clinched a playoff spot with his seventh win, and the winner between Shelby and Corey is right behind him. and There are four teams tied at 5-6, only one of which is guaranteed a playoff spot. I’m one of those teams. I’ve lost to all three others. One of the 5-6 teams is getting eliminated at the close of Evan and Kennedy’s game. On Tuesday morning, at most eight teams will still be in the chase. Cameron is well on his way to clinching that first-round bye with strong Thanksgiving performances from some of his top players, but with Spencer starting TB12 for one night only, anything could happen. Actually, lies. Cameron has already clinched a bye by virtue of head-to-head record against Tim and Brian, the only two teams with potential to tie his win total. Congratulations, Cameron.
Meanwhile, another one bites the dust. Spencer had a New York Giant’s chance of running the table and sneaking in the back door, but his team crapped out outside of the Monday night game, ending his winning streak at three games. Week 11 marked the second time Spencer got 50+ from Mahomes and lost and the fourth time he got 40+ from Mahomes and lost. Sad.
I can’t talk about anything else because it would risk talking about what may or may not happen regarding my team regarding playoff chances, so I hope you’ll take 2,000 random words on the Bucs and a scant couple paragraphs on the state of our league.
Food for thought: we might eliminate an in-season trade deadline and make the new trade deadline the last day of the regular season.
Finally, review the keeper rules. If you need the doc, I’ll attach it to the slack. I just want to make sure everyone knows what their options are as the end approaches. I’ll also attach a screenshot of the draft results and use this as an opportunity to remind you that our draft results according to ESPN are not accurate. Please feel free to ask if you’re not sure about anything. I assure you that I’m sure about everything.
Nope. Too scared to even do that. Good luck, everyone. And may the picks be plentiful!
