The PewterReport.com Roundtable features the opinions of the PR staff as it tackles a topic each week that involves the Bucs.

This week’s topic: What’s Your New Year’s Resolution For The Bucs?

Scott Reynolds: Better Starts In Tampa Bay In 2020

As the Bucs ring in the New Year, let’s hope 2020 is a season of better starts in Tampa Bay. That’s the resolution I want to see the Bucs cling to next season – getting off to better starts.

First, the Bucs have to start the season better. As head coach Bruce Arians said in his final press conference of the year, sometimes the season can be lost in September, and even though Tampa Bay went 2-2 to start the season, the season was really lost in October when the Bucs went 0-4. The Bucs did go on a four-game winning streak in December, but it wasn’t enough to make up for a 2-6 start.

Bucs HC Bruce Arians – Photo by: Cliff Welch/PR

Tampa Bay has started 2-5 in each of the last three seasons and hasn’t posted a winning record through the first seven games since the team started 4-3 in Raheem Morris’ final season as head coach in 2011. Ironically, Morris’ Bucs went 0-9 after that 4-3 start and never capitalized on that early season momentum. Yet a better start in 2020 under Arians should net a different – and better – result.

The Bucs also need to have better starts in games as the team trailed in the first quarter in eight of their games. Part of the reason for that is because the offense turned the ball over so many times on the first series of the game – seven to be exact, with quarterback Jameis Winston throwing an interception on Tampa Bay’s first drive six times. That’s a ridiculous stat and indicates how sloppy and unfocused the Bucs were at the start of some games.

Getting off to better starts in the first quarter could lead to more wins, and the more early wins this team can stack in 2020 can lead to much-needed momentum for a long-awaited playoff berth to start a new decade in Tampa Bay the right way.

Mark Cook: Win More Home Games

SR and I talk about it all the time. In fact we’ve told the stories to the young PR staff members so often it resembles Kwai Chang Caine sitting at the feet of Master Po in the old TV show Kung Fu. 

“There was once time when the Buccaneers didn’t lose at home young grasshoppers.”

During that time when the Buccaneers rarely lost at home, the question driving to the stadium wasn’t if they would win, but by how much? With a nasty, hard-hitting and dominant defense with Warren Sapp and Derrick Brooks leading the charge, when we looked at the schedule at when it came out, you could almost count on at least five home wins, if not more. I know younger Bucs fans find that hard to believe, but it is absolutely true.

In 1997 it was five wins, in 1998 they notched six wins, in 1999 it was seven wins, 2000 and 2001 saw them win five games and in 2002 the Buccaneers reeled off six wins in route to their first Super Bowl. My how times have changed.

This season the Buccaneers won a whopping two games at home. The previous three seasons, the Buccaneers went .500 at home, but in 2015 it was just three wins and 2014 saw the Bucs go winless at Raymond James Stadium.

Bucs head coach Bruce Arians said it this past week, you have to win at least five games at home. If you do, you have a decent shot at the playoffs. And when home wins come, so will the fans. Again, I know it is hard to believe for many newer Bucs fans, but Raymond James was once a tough place to play. Sellout crowds of 65,000 made it a difficult place for opponent to hear. Standing on the field in the fourth quarter, it was nearly impossible to hear the person standing beside you.

There are a ton of questions heading into 2020 with plenty of of possible personnel changes that might take place, but the playoffs are the goal. For that to happen, it has to start with dominating at home.

Trevor Sikkema: No More Bucs Beating Bucs

Is it the coaching? Is it the quarterback? Is it the offensive line? Is it the defense? Is it the owners? Is it the uniforms? No matter what you believe is the main culprit each year for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers falling short of postseason goals, and often goal of their own expectations outside of that, there’s a chance that you’d be right, at least in some regard.

Throughout what has statistically been the worst win-loss decade of Buccaneers football, there have been many elements of this franchise to blame. But it’s not like they aren’t trying. It’s not like they haven’t brought in good players or good coaches or made good decisions along the way. The problem seems to be that just when the Bucs might be in reach of actually competing, they shoot themselves in the foot.

Over and over and over again.

Let’s start off by addressing the turnovers. Since 2013, the Bucs have finished in the Top 10 for giveaways per season all but once (and in that one year they finished 11th). They’ve finished as the worst team in the league in that category twice (2018 and 2019) and second worst in another. There is no more direction correlation to shooting yourself in the foot than committing as many turnover as the Bucs have the last few years.

Bucs QB Jameis Winston – Photo by Andy Lyons/Getty Images

Then there’s the penalties. In 2019, the Bucs were the most penalized team in the NFL, and in 2018 they has the fifth most. Penalties are again another direction definition of “Bucs beating Bucs”, as head coach Bruce Arians would say. Penalties and poor discipline are things that should be easily corrected, yet for years it has been a problem in Tampa Bay — through two different coaching staffs.

Finally there is the idea of beating the opponents you should beat. Mark mentioned above that sometimes that has to do with winning at home, something the Bucs have been terrible at for a long time. But then there’s just simply not choking and not playing down to the level of teams you are more talented than. The Bucs do not have a sense of winning around them to pull that off consistently. Every game is a battle. I understand that the NFL is a tough league to consistently win in, but the Bucs make that a lot harder than it has to be.

2020 needs to be the year the Bucs put all that behind them. It has to be the year the Bucs stop beating Bucs, and start beating the rest of the NFL instead – something they have the talent to do more of than what they’ve shown over the last decade.

Taylor Jenkins: Limit The Turnovers

Jameis Winston has never been what you would necessarily call an efficient quarterback, from a turnover perspective, and that never rang truer than in 2019.

As Winston watched his final pass of the season sail into the hands of linebacker Deion Jones, a throw that would ultimately be returned for a record-setting, game-ending pick six in overtime of the Bucs’ Week 17 matchup against the Falcons, it cemented him as the first quarterback to finish a season with both 30 interceptions and 30 touchdowns.

Winston’s 30 interceptions tie him for seventh-most for a single season in NFL history and his seven pick-sixes also set an NFL record. Maybe the turnovers wouldn’t sting quite as bad for Bucs fans if Tampa Bay had another lousy year, like it appeared they would be having as they sat at a 2-6 record before rattling off four wins in five weeks over the second half of the season, but the fact that Tampa Bay fell just short of their first .500 season since 2016 and lost six games by one score or less makes the turnovers even more painful.

“You look at it and there’s so much good and so much outright terrible,” head coach Bruce Arians said this past week, and it’s true.

Bucs TE O.J. Howard – Photo by: Cliff Welch/PR

No matter the league-leading total in passing yards, becoming the eighth quarterback to ever eclipse the 5,000-yard mark, and the 33 passing touchdowns that ranked him second in the league, the Bucs will absolutely be a sinking ship if Winston lets next year become a repeat performance, should he even be back in red and pewter for 2020.

All-in-all there are a handful of things that Tampa Bay needs to fix or improve as they head into the new decade, but the one resolution that most absolutely be the team’s top priority is limiting the amount of times they give the ball away.

Matt Matera: Committing Less Penalties 

One of the staples of a team coached by Bruce Arians is having a team that is smart and holds themselves accountable. Arians of course has the infamous “accountability sheet” that marks any mental errors made in practice or a game. When Arians became the Bucs’ head coach it was thought that the penalties would go down, but the exact opposite happened.

The Bucs led the NFL in overall penalties with 158 as well as penalties accepted in the season with 134. Those numbers accounted for 1,111 yards, with all three statistics being more than the year prior. The most alarming part of all of this was that the Bucs were also first in the NFL with 56 pre-snap penalties, and that’s where the mental mistakes come in. You don’t want them to occur, but mistakes penalties like holding and pass interference are bound to eventually happen in competitive games, but it’s the pre-snap penalties that are easily preventable. Those are the mental errors that Arians hates to have, and he voiced his displeasure about it in his final press conference the day after the season ended.

“I pride myself on having a smart football team,” Arians said. “And we were not a smart football team. [That is] one of the areas we will address this offseason.”

Photo by: Cliff Welch/PR

All the penalties came across the board for the Bucs, which was a problem as well. According to Greg Auman of The Athletic, Shaq Barrett led the defense with 10 penalties on the season (all pre-snap) and Demar Dotson led the offense with also 10. There were some crucial penalties that came back to hurt the Bucs this year, whether they were good calls by the refs or not. They included a penalty as early as a Week 1 call on Dotson that negated a Cam Brate touchdown, and happened as late as Week 17 offensive pass interference penalty on O.J. Howard that stalled the Bucs drive where they missed a field goal. Ronald Jones also suffered from having big runs negated by penalties, with one that came in the Bucs’ Week 4 game against the Rams.

In many ways this season, the Bucs have beaten themselves. Whether it was turnovers by Jameis Winston or inconsistent play early on from the defense and special teams, there were many examples of the Bucs beating the Bucs. Adding all the penalties is just another way that they beat themselves this year. In 2020, the Bucs’ New Year’s resolution should be to get out of their own way by committing fewer penalties, and Bruce Arians also expressed that this is one of his first priorities this offseason.

“We will quit beating ourselves and then we’ll be hard to beat,” Arians said. “The penalties, the turnovers, there were very, very few missed assignments anymore. The accountability is there. They play extremely hard and we’ll be a tough out.”