Coming off a humbling 24-9 loss in Detroit on Monday Night Football, the 5-2 Bucs come into Sunday afternoon’s game at the Superdome against the 1-6 Saints looking for a bounce-back effort and a win to send them into their bye week on a strong note. Not only that, but Tampa Bay needs a win to get to 2-0 in NFC South play and remain atop the division, as Carolina sits just one game back of first place entering Week 8.

Despite the rash of injuries week in and week out and the frustrating loss to the Lions that came last week, it’s been a largely positive start to the season for Todd Bowles and the Bucs. And beating a struggling Saints team and getting to 6-2 heading into a much-needed and well-deserved bye week would put a nice bow on the first half of the season. Not to mention, the NFC playoff picture is stacked with 5-2 teams, so a win is needed to at least keep pace, if not gain ground, on the rest of the field.

Tampa Bay has only started 6-2 four other times in its history: 1979, 2002, 2020 and 2021. The 1979 team made it to the NFC Championship Game and the 2021 team was potentially a coverage breakdown away from doing the same, while the 2002 and 2020 teams both won the Super Bowl. So, could getting to that 6-2 mark be a good sign of things to come as the Bucs look to make a deeper playoff run in their 50th season as a franchise?

Bucs QB Baker Mayfield – Photo by: USA Today

As for the Saints under first-year head coach Kellen Moore, this is about making a last-ditch effort to keep their season from essentially being over before Halloween. They come in at 1-6, having started 0-4 and having lost their last two games following their lone win of the season. This is a team that is seemingly in the very, very early stages of what could be a long rebuild, and is probably playing more for draft positioning right now than anything else, much less the playoffs.

Still, despite missing the playoffs in each of the last four seasons since Drew Brees retired, New Orleans tends to play Tampa Bay tough and could do so again on Sunday at the Superdome.

Let’s dive further into what might decide this matchup, as well as some key players to watch in this NFC South battle between two teams that flat-out don’t like each other very much:

What Might Decide This Bucs-Saints Matchup?

Sunday afternoon at the Superdome would be a great time for the Bucs’ best rushing performance of the season. The absences of Bucky Irving, Luke Goedeke and Cody Mauch have hurt the Tampa Bay run game in 2025, and as a result, the team ranks 24th in rushing. That’s a far cry from the fourth-ranked run game it had a year ago.

The Bucs have topped 125 rushing yards just once this season, all the way back in Week 2 when they ran for 169 against the Texans. They’ve been held under 60 yards on the ground twice in the last three weeks, which has put extra pressure on Baker Mayfield and the passing game, which will be now missing Mike Evans for the majority of the rest of the season and will continue to miss Chris Godwin Jr. and Jalen McMillan on Sunday.

There’s hope, as the Saints are giving up 129.4 rushing yards per game, ranking 24th in the NFL. If Rachaad White and potentially even Sean Tucker can get going on the ground behind an offensive line that features two reserves on the right side, it could take a lot off of Mayfield’s shoulders and make it so that he’s not having to play hero ball from start to finish the way he’s had to for much of the season.

Bucs RB Rachaad White – Photo by: USA Today

With that said, a big part of the outcome in this game will still fall on Mayfield and whether he can bounce back from his worst game of the season in Monday night’s loss to the Lions. He never looked comfortable in that game and was missing open receivers all over the field. That combined with an abandonment of the run game made for a disjointed effort from the offense that only led to nine points. Offensive coordinator Josh Grizzard will learn from that game and should come back with a huge bounce-back of his own against New Orleans.

Mayfield will need to be on target this week and get the ball to the likes of Emeka Egbuka, Sterling Shepard, Tez Johnson and Cade Otton to keep the chains moving and put some pressure on the Saints offense to keep up. Johnson has been especially hot in recent weeks, catching his first two NFL touchdowns in the last two games and setting a new career high with four catches for 58 yards against the Lions.

Cutting down on the number of explosive plays allowed will decide this game from the Tampa Bay defense’s standpoint. Todd Bowles’ side of the football has been pretty fundamentally sound for the most part this season, with the only big plays opponents have been able to regularly hit on have been passes to their running backs in space. SirVocea Dennis has been the biggest culprit on these plays, and he needs to be better in the open field. That’ll prove especially key against a guy like Alvin Kamara.

Bucs DT Vita Vea and Saints QB Spencer Rattler – Photo by: Cliff Welch/PR

The other factor for the Bucs defense will be whether it can find a way to generate pressure on Spencer Rattler. The loss of Haason Reddick means Tampa Bay is now without two of its top pass rushers (with Calijah Kancey being the other). Yaya Diaby is hot right now, and Vita Vea is always a threat up the middle. But Bowles may also need to send more blitzes from every direction throughout the day to account for the lack of depth off the edge. And as always, more takeaways would help, too, as the unit has tallied two takeaways in each of the last three games, making up for a slow start to the season in that department.

On the Saints’ side, the offensive line needs to be able to protect Rattler and give him a clean pocket in order to put together the type of offensive effort that will be needed to pull off the upset. The 15 sacks allowed by New Orleans is right around the middle of the pack in the league, but Tampa Bay managed to affect Rattler in the matchup between these two teams at the Superdome last year. The Bucs got to him five times, and a repeat of that would put the home team in a bad spot on Sunday.

Rattler has to play turnover-free football, too. In a game between two teams of vastly different talent levels, the worse team can’t afford to give the better team extra chances. The second-year quarterback has thrown four interceptions over seven games this year, but three of those came in last week’s loss to the Bears. The Bucs have been on a good run of forcing turnovers, so they’ll look to relocate what Chicago did to Rattler come Sunday. Avoiding another multi-interception game is a must for the New Orleans offense.

Saints RB Alvin Kamara and Bucs DB Christian Izien – Photo by: USA Today

Getting Kamara going would also go a long way in the Saints’ effort to upset the Bucs. Tampa Bay just struggled mightily with Detroit’s Jahmyr Gibbs and while Kamara is 30 and past the point of being on the level of Gibbs, he can still be dangerous as both a runner and a pass catcher. Bowles’ defense has done a good job containing the veteran running back in recent years, and keeping that going will be huge for the road team come Sunday afternoon.

It’s also crucial that the Bucs don’t let Rashid Shaheed beat them deep. Chris Olave leads the Saints with 44 catches for 440 yards (10.0 avg.) and three touchdowns, but Shaheed is a dangerous deep threat and has 356 yards and two touchdowns on 30 catches this season, averaging a team-high 11.9 yards per catch. His 87-yard touchdown catch against the Giants in Week 5 stands as the Saints’ longest play of the season thus far, and an explosive play like that can come at any time and flip momentum in the game. Tampa Bay has to be sure it doesn’t have any communication breakdowns on the back end in this one.

Defensively for New Orleans, the core largely remains the same and despite their age, these are guys who can still make plays. That’s especially true of the ageless Demario Davis, who is like Lavonte David in the sense that he’s still producing in his mid-to-late 30s. So far this season, he has a team-high 61 tackles and has five tackles for loss, a forced fumble and a fumble recovery. He’ll remain a key in this game, as will Carl Granderson, who leads the Saints defense with 4.5 sacks.

Saints DE Carl Granderon and Bucs QB Baker Mayfield – Photo by: USA Today

This isn’t a defense that is racking up sacks at a high clip, as the unit is averaging two per game over seven games. However, seven different defenders have gotten to the quarterback at some point this season, with Cameron Jordan (2.5), Pete Werner (2.0), Bryan Bresee (1.5), Chris Rumph II (1.0), Alontae Taylor (1.0) and Chase Young (0.5) all trailing behind Granderson’s lead. If the Saints pass rush can get after Mayfield and shut down his escape lanes, it could keep the Buccaneer offense in neutral.

The other equalizer for the Saints could be takeaways. The Bucs have been good with the football for much of this season, but it’s no surprise that their two losses have featured Mayfield’s only two interceptions and the team’s only two fumbles. Tampa Bay’s four turnovers are tied for the third-fewest in the league, so forcing mistakes could be difficult for the New Orleans defense. However, the Saints have nine takeaways in seven games, so this is a group that can challenge the Bucs’ ball security.

Key Players To Watch

Tez Johnson has really emerged the last two weeks, first bringing in a 45-yard touchdown in a win over the 49ers before hauling in four catches for 58 yards and the Bucs’ lone touchdown in the loss to the Lions. He’ll need to keep being a factor in the offense this week and as the season goes on, as the loss of Mike Evans and the continued absences of Chris Godwin Jr. and Jalen McMillan are challenging the receiving corps’ depth. That depth is something the Bucs feel good about, but it’s up to Johnson to team up with fellow rookie Emeka Egbuka and veteran Sterling Shepard to keep the offense humming with three of its top four receivers sidelined.

Bucs DB Tykee Smith – Photo by: USA Today

On the Buccaneer defense, how about the season Tykee Smith is having? He leads Tampa Bay with 58 tackles and has two sacks, four tackles for loss, seven passes defensed and a fumble recovery. The only thing that’s really missing is his first interception of the year, and that very well could come on Sunday he returns to the site of his first career interception and faces the quarterback he picked off for it. He is PFF’s second-highest-graded Tampa Bay defender with a 75.7, and his 82.9 run defense and 90.1 pass rush grades stand out in particular.

The player to watch on the Saints offense is going to be Chris Olave. As much as Rashid Shaheed and Alvin Kamara can threaten the Bucs defense, Olave is the receiver who Spencer Rattler looks to the most – by far. His 71 targets this season are the second-most in the NFL behind only Ja’Marr Chase’s 80, and that speaks to how important he is to the New Orleans offense and to Rattler himself. That’s an average of 10.1 targets per game, and you can bet he’ll see a high target share again on Sunday whether he’s covered or not. What happens on those double-digit targets may directly correlate with what kind of game this turns into.

For the Saints defense, the player to keep an eye on is cornerback Kool-Aid McKinstry. He’s likely to match up with Tez Johnson, which has some added intrigue given that the two are former high school teammates. McKinstry leads the New Orleans defense with two interceptions and five passes defensed this season, but he has also struggled quite a bit at the same time. He has been targeted 34 times this season and has allowed 24 catches for 353 yards (a team-high) and four touchdowns (also a team-high). It’s been pretty volatile for the former Alabama corner, and which way it goes for him on Sunday may have an impact on the outcome of the game.