Tampa Bay Buccaneers
Photos: Five Areas for Improvement
Lovie Smith believes the Buccaneers will be a good football team in 2014...For him to be right, they will have to see significant improvement in such areas as YAC and sacks per pass play. - Scott Smith
Solution: Josh McCown - The Buccaneers ranked 29th in the NFL in completion percentage in 2013, ahead of only the Cleveland Browns and the New York Jets. Of the bottom 15 teams in the NFL in that category last year, only one made the playoffs, and that was the San Francisco 49ers, a team that relied on great defense and a running threat at quarterback. That's great work if you can get it, but for the most part you're going to have to complete 60% of your passes to have a chance in the NFL.
Solution: McCown, Evans, Sims & Tedford - Last year, the Super Bowl champion Seattle Seahawks ranked 26th in the league in passing yards. But they also ranked fifth in YAC, suggesting that they were able to complement their strong running game with a quick-strike, big-play passing attack. That's exactly what Lovie Smith wants to construct in Tampa.
Solution: A healthy Doug Martin - The Bucs were 31st in the league in that category last year, with Tennessee slipping beneath them at 31.1%. What's more telling is that this figure is the fifth-worst in the franchise's 38-season history, and three of the four seasons below 2013 belong to the inaugural 1976-78 corridor. The Bucs' struggles on third down last year were seriously anachronistic.
Solution: Michael Johnson, Clinton McDonald & Lovie Smith - It's not news, of course, that a strong pass rush is important. With the ever-increasing efficiency of passing attacks in the NFL - with rules that generally favor the offense - the best way to keep a quarterback like Drew Brees or Tom Brady from overwhelming you is to disrupt the pass before he can get it off. Of the 12 teams that made the playoffs last year, seven ranked in the top 10 in sacks per pass play on defense, and another ranked 14th. The only team to make it into the postseason with an anemic pass rush was Philadelphia, which ranked 31st.
Solution: Lovie Smith, Jeff Tedford & Leslie Frazier - The Buccaneers were an unusual aberration when it came to turnover differential last year. They finished at +10, which is usually the harbinger of a winning record. In fact, the Bucs were seventh in the NFL in this category, and the only team in the top eight that did not make the playoffs. Part of the reason that the Bucs' 31 takeaways (tied for fourth in the NFL) didn't translate into more wins is that the team didn't turn them into enough points. That's an issue for both the offense and the defense - the Bucs need their defenders to take more of those turnovers to the house, and they need their offense to take better advantage of good field position.
