John Romano: The defense is getting nasty, and that means the Buccaneers have some hope

John Romano, Tampa Bay Times on Nov 2, 2026

Published in Football

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TAMPA, Fla. — Hope is just around the corner. To get there, keep walking past the pestilence and turn left at the hellfire.

And should you arrive, it’ll be nothing but rainbows and shutouts for your Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

Yes, the team that went 0 for September may have been reborn in November. Following an unconventional win at Carolina last week, the Bucs checked in with an even wackier 16-0 victory against Atlanta in a steady rainstorm at Raymond James Stadium on Sunday.

Amazingly, the Bucs are only a half-game out of first place in the NFC South. They own the early tiebreaker advantage against the Panthers and Falcons and, fittingly enough, there’s no longer a line at the betting window to wager on Todd Bowles’ job status.

“If we win all our division games, we can go to the playoffs,” cornerback Jacob Parrish said. “That’s what Coach Bowles says.”

Not sure if that’s mathematically definitive, but the basic gist is true enough. A 6-0 record in the South would guarantee Tampa Bay seven wins on the season, which would put the Bucs within arm’s length of a winning record. The question is whether they can pull it off.

In the previous 24 seasons that the NFC South existed, the 2020 Saints are the only team to go undefeated in the division.

But those are worries for down the road. Today’s news is that this defense might be strong enough to put the rest of the team on its back.

“When you get into a hole like we were in, it’s so easy to just give up,” said cornerback Zyon McCollum, who had his second interception of the season on Sunday. “But we knew as a defense just how close we were. We could see that it was one play here, one play there, one busted coverage. If we could just sharpen those things up, we knew what we could attain.

“So to finally see it start to happen for us to put complete games together, it’s extremely motivating for this defense.”

The road is still long, but the signposts are there for the defense. The Bucs are forcing turnovers and shutting down running games. They’re in the top 10 in the NFL in fewest points allowed per game, and they’ve seemingly solved the fourth-quarter woes that cost them games earlier in the season.

They’re not close to dominating the league the way Bucs teams did in the early 2000s, but they are far better than they showed in September, when opponents were scoring 26.3 points a game against Tampa Bay.

“Shoot, we just doubled down on everything we had been doing,” said defensive tackle Rakeem Nunez-Roches. “We knew how great we could be, we were just our own worst enemy back then. It was penalties, pre-snap reads, things like that. So we needed to take care of the small details. And because we were so close to making it happen, we were able to hold each other accountable. That’s the big thing.

“We had been through OTAs, through training camp, we were brothers. We could look each other in the eye and say, ‘Tighten up, I need you.’”

To be fair, the defense had some built-in advantages on Sunday. The wind and rain made it difficult to throw the ball — the Bucs became the first team since 1974 to win a game without completing a pass — so they were able to focus on Atlanta running back Bijan Robinson.

And on the few occasions when quarterback Michael Penix Jr. attempted to throw, the pass rush got in his face and the secondary laid in the weeds. Linebacker Alex Anzalone had the first two-interception game of his NFL career and already has a career-high three picks in his 10th season in the league.

Less than halfway through the season, the Bucs have 12 interceptions. They finished 2025 with 13.

Whether they can maintain this pace in the final nine games is still an open question. But it’s trending in the right direction.

When they began the season 0-4, the Bucs were averaging one takeaway per game. Since then, they’ve averaged three takeaways a game.

“I’ve been in situations like that before,” Anzalone said. “We had an even worse start in Detroit in 2022 (when the Lions were 1-6 before winning eight of 10), and it’s easy to start pointing fingers or panicking or start talking about how so-and-so needs to play or whatnot.

“But if you watched the film, you could see we just weren’t finishing games. We weren’t winning because of those two-minute situations, and we were not capitalizing on the opportunities we had. If you look around, that’s what this league is. It’s a lot of one-score games, and those games just weren’t going our way.

“But we stayed on course, and look at us now.”

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