Only three teams in NFL history (excluding the strike-shortened 1982 campaign) have made the playoffs with a losing record. Tampa Bay is poised to become the fourth, joining a rudderless fraternity that includes the 2010 Seahawks (7-9), the 2014 Panthers (7-8-1), and, most recently, the Washington Football Team in 2020 (7-9).
The Buccaneers, objectively, have no business being in the playoffs. They’re 6-8 with a -41-point differential and a resume that includes losses to Carolina, Pittsburgh and Cleveland, among other postseason afterthoughts. Yet, the Bucs find themselves in the driver’s seat, holding a 72-percent playoff probability with three games to go.
There exists the very possibility that a seven-win team will win the NFC South, representing what could go down as the worst division of all-time. The Buccaneers potentially hosting a home Wild Card game is a pretty good argument for scrapping divisions, or, at the very least, overhauling how the playoffs are seeded. Of course, when the NFL expanded its postseason field from 12 to 14 teams, it probably didn’t envision a team like the Bucs getting in, living a charmed existence as the best of a decidedly lackluster bunch.
Snap a picture for posterity because you may never, in your lifetime, see a division as bad as this one, an unprecedented display of ineptitude from four, hopelessly incompetent teams barreling toward rock bottom. Remarkably, they’ve only been marginally worse than their AFC counterpart, led by the 7-7 Tennessee Titans.
The tattered remains of a once-proud division, the NFC South, in its current haphazard state, could be framed as a positive in the sense that at least the NFL now has parity, making our Sundays as dramatic and unpredictable as they’ve ever been. But, if the playoffs are meant to reward the league’s best teams, the Bucs certainly aren’t one of them. Tampa Bay’s profound mediocrity will likely be remembered as an outlier, a bizarre novelty symbolic of what has been an unusually chaotic season. Still, the looming threat of a 7-10 laughingstock taking precedence over a more qualified Wild Card team, perhaps Detroit (7-7) or Washington (7-6-1), is a scenario the NFL must be dreading.
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