The odds are stacked against the Bucs.

No, quite literally.

If you look at the Vegas odds, the Bucs over/under for wins this season is just 6.5. And if you look at it game-by-game they are favored in just five of their 17 games this season as of this writing. And in those five games they are favored by just the slightest of margins. The Bucs are most favored in their Week 13 matchup at home against the Panthers where the moneyline has the Bucs as a -115 favorite. The implied odds of that matchup have the Bucs as a 53.5% favorite.

Compare that to the nine (NINE!) matchups where they are underdogs by at least that much. This includes their Week 8 matchup in Buffalo where they are a +370 underdog. The implied odds of that matchup have the Bucs as a 78.7% underdog. With Vegas and national pundits consistently predicting the Bucs to be one of the worst teams in the league it has created quite the conversation around what Tampa Bay’s floor might be.

What Is A Floor?

Bucs HC Todd Bowles – Photo by: Cliff Welch/PR

Before we can discuss what the Bucs’ floor is we need to define what a “floor” is. A reasonable definition is the 10th percentile outcome. What is a reasonable expectation for a team if most things go wrong?

What I ventured to do was to take the implied odds of each matchup the Bucs have in 2023 and decipher the probability of each potential outcome in terms of number of wins. To determine the Bucs’ floor, I aimed to find out how few wins Tampa Bay would win to encompass 10% of the probable outcomes.

What Is The Bucs Floor?

This is quite the hot topic of debate. I was lured into it by Michael Pless of RealBucsTalk.

Over, 7 wins is the floor for this team. Defense is too good. Offense will surprise with new scheme. https://t.co/02LWckwwNq

— RealBucsTalk (@RealBucsTalk) July 22, 2023

After challenging Pless regarding seven wins being a floor, well, all hell broke loose.

Most of the arguments in the thread stemmed from loose comparisons to terrible Bucs teams of yore, or vacuum-induced logic statements referring to specific changes the Bucs have made over this offseason without context. None of it could be considered a well-thought-out, comprehensive argument to determine how many wins you could expect if everything went wrong for the Bucs in 2023.

The Results

Looking at the probability of each number of wins from 0-17 you get a fairly standard distribution chart.

But looking at it this way doesn’t give you the full picture in terms of the expectations of how many wins the Bucs can be expected to at least win if multiple things went wrong. For that, a graph displaying the cumulative probability of each number of wins is a better visual representative.

Looking at the Bucs win probability this way I came to find out my conjecture at the team’s floor was a bit too pessimistic.

Ceiling 13
Floor 3

Best guess for prediction: 9-8

But my confidence in that prediction is bananas low due to the nature of the variance of sooo many aspects of this team.

— Joshua Queipo (@josh_queipo) July 22, 2023

I suspected the team had a floor of three wins. Or there was at least a 10% chance they could win three games or less. It turns out I was wrong. At least by a measure of using Vegas implied odds. By this method, the Bucs’ odds of winning three games or less is actually less than 4%.

But to get to the 10% threshold I was looking for, we don’t have to go very far. We get there at four wins.

This still may be too low for those who look at a talented defense full of players that are considered some of the best in the league by many close to the game and think there is no way the team can lose that many games. But Vegas has long made a lot of money by being fairly accurate with their predictions.

What About The Bucs’ Ceiling?

Bucs OC Dave Canales – Photo by: Cliff Welch/PR

When people talk floors, the discussion surrounding ceilings is usually not far behind. By using the same approach (cutting the distribution tail at 10%) on the high end we get a ceiling of nine wins. Using this method, we find that the Bucs accumulate nine or less wins with a 90.50% probability, giving the team a fairly low ceiling.

In an NFC South that is still viewed as a pretty week division nine wins could still produce a division winner. After all, eight wins did the trick for the Bucs last year.

With a new offensive coordinator in Dave Canales, who is new to the position altogether, an offensive line that will return zero players to the position they played last year, a running back corps that combined for just 779 yards rushing last year, and a quarterback whose results have run almost the full range of possibilities, it isn’t hard to understand that the likelihood the Bucs offense is even above average is less than 50%.

And in a league where the correlation between good offenses and good teams is much stronger than the correlation between good defenses and good teams you begin to understand why the Bucs have both a low floor and a low ceiling for 2023.

But for the record … I was wrong about three wins.