The struggles of the Buccaneers offense have generated a lot of attention this season.
They have dropped from 30 points a game in 2021 to 18.5 in 2022 and they have scored 29 offensive touchdowns through 16 games after posting 56 to this point last year. Those numbers don’t leave much room for interpretation, but offensive coordinator Byron Leftwich still pushed back at them on Thursday.
Leftwich said that there have “been moments where we haven’t really been that bad” and that people “over-exaggerate” the magnitude of the difficulties that the offense faced this season.
“When you really listen to people talk about us, that’s emotions talking,” Leftwich said, via Joey Knight of the Tampa Bay Times. “That’s not really people that’s watching us, watching us get better every week. For some reason, everybody wants to throw dirt on the Bucs, but we’re not ready for people to throw dirt on us.”
The nice thing for Leftwich and the Bucs is that the slate will be blank next weekend. They’ll be hosting a playoff game and the kind of offensive performance they had against the Panthers last weekend will position them well for a win. If that’s how things play out, it will be even easier to forget the weeks when nothing was clicking because they’ll be one of the last eight teams standing.
