For the first time since 2021, the Buccaneers enter a season without their all-time leading receiver on the roster. That single fact tells you more about where this team stands than any preseason record could. Mike Evans is gone, the division crown has already changed hands once, and Tampa Bay's season now hinges on how much football a soon-to-be-free-agent quarterback has left in a contract year.
The staff: continuity at the top, questions underneath
Todd Bowles enters his fifth season as head coach, which by NFC South standards now counts as stability. His staff carries the offense forward under coordinator Zac Robinson, with T.J. Yates as pass game coordinator, Kevin Carberry running the offensive line and run game, and Danny Smith overseeing special teams.
On defense, Bowles has no separate coordinator listed on staff. He continues to call the defense himself, leaning on George Edwards as pass game coordinator and Larry Foote running the outside linebackers and run game. On the Rondé Barber Show this preseason, Bowles talked about wanting an "attitude change" on defense, language that suggests he was not satisfied with what he saw from that unit in 2025.
The quarterback situation
Baker Mayfield is playing out the third and final year of his contract. Extension talks reportedly broke down before training camp, and Mayfield has said he felt disrespected and undervalued in the process, though he showed up and participated fully regardless. How he plays in 2026 will likely determine whether Tampa Bay pays him at the top of the market or watches him test free agency in 2027. Jalon Daniels is listed as his backup on the current depth chart.
Mayfield's supporting cast changed in one major way: the receiver he has thrown to for his entire Tampa Bay tenure is no longer here.
Who left, who stayed, who arrived
Mike Evans signed a three-year deal worth up to $42.4 million with the San Francisco 49ers in March 2026, ending a 12-season run in Tampa Bay that included a Super Bowl LV ring, six Pro Bowl selections, and franchise records for career receiving yards (12,684), receptions (836) and touchdowns (105). He also finished his Buccaneers career on an 11-season streak of 1,000-yard receiving seasons to open a career, a mark shared only with Jerry Rice. Losing that kind of target, and that kind of locker room presence, is not something an offense simply replaces with a draft pick.
Lavonte David retired on March 24, 2026, after 14 seasons as a Buccaneer, the only NFL team he ever played for. He was productive to the very end, recording 3.5 sacks, 114 tackles, an interception and two forced fumbles in his final season. His retirement, alongside Evans' departure, strips the roster of two of its longest-tenured leaders in the same offseason.
Vita Vea requested a trade earlier in the summer amid contract frustration, but instead of moving on, he and the team agreed to a one-year, $30 million extension on August 19, 2026. Keeping their best interior defensive lineman in the building, even after a public trade request, was arguably the single most important retention of the offseason.
Elsewhere, cornerback depth has been a running storyline all camp, with the team bringing back veteran Sean Murphy-Bunting and leaning on rookies to round out the room.
The 2026 draft class
The headline pick was Rueben Bain Jr., an edge rusher out of Miami, taken 15th overall in the first round, a clear signal that adding pressure off the edge was the top offseason priority. Tampa Bay also added linebacker Josiah Trotter out of Missouri in the second round, wide receiver Ted Hurst out of Georgia State in the third (acquired via a trade with Green Bay), and cornerback Keionte Scott, also out of Miami, in the fourth. Later picks brought in defensive tackle DeMonte Capehart from Clemson and tight end Bauer Sharp from LSU. Scott in particular is already being talked about as a Week 1 contributor given the state of the cornerback room.
The roster cutdown
The Buccaneers finalized their 53-man roster, along with a 15-player practice squad, ahead of the 2026 opener. The clearest storylines to come out of camp and preseason were less about who got cut and more about who is healthy: right guard Cody Mauch is back after the knee injury that Bowles has said the offensive line never fully recovered from last season, receiver Emeka Egbuka has been dealing with a toe injury that put his Week 1 availability in question, and running back Bucky Irving heads into what several beat reporters are calling a make-or-break year. The team went 2-1 in the preseason, beating the Jets and Chiefs before losing to the Jaguars in the preseason finale, results that mean little on their own but at least suggest a competitive roster in camp.
The schedule: Cincinnati opens the year
Tampa Bay opens the 2026 season on the road against the Cincinnati Bengals on Sunday, September 13, at Paycor Stadium. Kickoff is scheduled for 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time, which works out to 7:00 p.m. Central European Summer Time for anyone in Germany, the Netherlands or elsewhere on the continent planning to watch. The Buccaneers then return home for a stretch against Cleveland, Minnesota and Green Bay before their first road trip of consequence, a Thursday night game at Dallas in Week 5. Notably, unlike several other NFC teams, the Buccaneers do not have an international game on their 2026 schedule; the league's Munich date this November belongs to the Patriots and Lions instead.
The NFC South picture
This is no longer the division the Buccaneers ran away with for four straight years. The Carolina Panthers, under second-year head coach Dave Canales, won the NFC South in 2025 with an 8-9 record, their first playoff appearance since 2017, before losing a Wild Card shootout to the Los Angeles Rams, 34-31. Tampa Bay finished 2025 at the same 8-9 mark but lost the division on tiebreakers. [CHECK: exact number of consecutive division titles the Buccaneers held before losing the crown in 2025; multiple sources reference a run of four straight, which would mean 2022 through 2025, but this should be confirmed against final 2025 standings.]
The Atlanta Falcons fired Raheem Morris on January 4, 2026, after two seasons, and hired former Cleveland Browns head coach Kevin Stefanski on January 17, a significant upgrade in coaching pedigree that could make Atlanta the division's biggest wildcard. The New Orleans Saints, in Kellen Moore's second year after a 6-11 finish in 2025, enter the season with Tyler Shough as the established starter following Spencer Rattler's midseason benching and Derek Carr's retirement, still rebuilding after five straight years outside the playoffs.
In short: four teams, four different trajectories, and no obvious favorite the way there was as recently as 2023.
A sober expectation
There is a version of 2026 where Baker Mayfield, playing for his next contract, has the best season of his career and the young defensive additions grow up fast enough to make Bowles' promised "attitude change" real. There is also a version where losing Evans and David in the same offseason shows up in October, the offensive line's health does not hold, and a team that has finished 8-9 two years running finishes there again, or worse.
Neither version makes Tampa Bay a clear top-tier team entering September. What it does have is a coach who has now been in the building longer than any of his three divisional counterparts, a defensive front that just got meaningfully more talented on paper, and a quarterback with every incentive in the world to play the best football of his career. That is not a Super Bowl case. It is a case for a team that should be competitive for a playoff spot in a division nobody has clearly claimed, and not much more than that until it proves otherwise on the field.
