Buccaneers Playoff Strategy

The Bucs really need to win the NFC South if they're going to make it into the playoffs. The NFC East has three teams that are all over .500 and the NFC North has two. All of those teams are on what you might call hot streaks, while the Bucs followed two mistake-riddled losses by squeaking out a win against a Cardinals team that played so badly that it is haunting Kurt Warner's nightmares. And if you've seen his wife, you know he's not easily scared. Seriously, I'd rather fuck an active 4-slot toaster than Brenda Warner.

But in case the Saints do make a late run for the division title, we need a strategy for getting the Bucs into the playoffs. In general, we're rooting for one team to win each NFC division in a landslide while the other teams wallow around in their mediocrity. So if the Bucs somehow miss out on winning their division, they can land one of the wildcard spots as long as they have a halfway decent record. As it stands today, we want the Cowboys and Packers to continue winning and for the Giants, Redskins and Lions to fall down a gorge.

The Redskins I'm not so worried about. They were beaten like Amy Winehouse by the Patriots and were so humiliated and angry that the next week they took out their aggressions on the super-crappy Jets and won by a field goal in overtime. If you can't beat the Jets this year during regulation, you should be automatically disqualified from the playoffs. The Giants (and specifically Eli Manning) traditionally have sucked serious balls late in the season, but a six-game winning streak is nothing to sneeze at (despite the fact that some of those wins were against Miami, San Francisco, Atlanta and the Jets.) The rest of their schedule is kind of hard, though, so there's a chance they could get whipped a few times and fall out of the running. I have a feeling that if they lose a really embarrassing one that the old Tom Coughlin will be back and making up for lost time in his morale-killing. The Lions are difficult to analyze because they haven't beaten anyone with a winning record except the Bucs, but they seem resilient. The good news is that their schedule gets tougher later in the season and Matt Millen is still steering the ship.

So this week, Bucs fans should root for the Rams, Falcons, Packers, Eagles (sorry), Raiders, Cardinals, Cowboys and Seahawks.

And this is it. The bye week is almost over and no Buccaneers have been arrested or shot their mouths off, so there's very little to talk about. With that in mind, this will probably be the only entry for the day. Which means I'll need some sort of crutch.