The Tampa Bay Buccaneers have some work to do to get where they want to go. The team put in a strong season in 2024, winning 10 games, but it came far short of its goal when it lost to the Washington Commanders in the Wild Card round of the playoffs.
Bucs left tackle Tristan Wirfs knows what it takes to win a Super Bowl — he did it in 2020 when Tom Brady was in town. He recently appeared on Ryan Clark’s podcast, The Pivot, and he was asked what it would take for the Bucs to get back to the promised land.
He keyed in on two things. The first thing is simple — fundamental football.
“I feel like it’s not shooting ourselves in the foot,” Wirfs said. “There were so many times this year where we were in one-score games, in close games — if you take away some mental stuff during the games, you don’t know how it goes.”
The second had to do with the offense, which makes sense, given he plays on it. The Bucs were a high-scoring unit under offensive coordinator Liam Coen last year, but Wirfs wanted to score more touchdowns in the red zone to put up even more points.
“There was one game, like later in the season, where we were in the red zone three times. We still put up a decent amount of points, but we didn’t score in the red zone three times — that’s 21 points… we still ended up winning, but tack on 21 more points instead of nine.”
As mentioned, Wirfs was likely thinking of the team’s 26-23 overtime win over the Carolina Panthers, where the team kicked twice in the red zone and then an additional three times outside of it. Despite that, though, Tampa Bay was quite good in the red zone — they were the No. 4 team in the nation in red zone scoring percentage last year at 66.67%.
Regardless, Wirfs is a competitor, and No. 4 may not be good enough for this Tampa Bay Buccaneers team. The Bucs will have a new offensive coordinator in Josh Grizzard to try and improve that red zone percentage, and it will be up to head coach Todd Bowles to instill that fundamental football into his team.
Do both of those things, and the Bucs might just lift that Lombardi Trophy again this time next year.
