Buccaneers Have Clear Path To Be The Top Seed In The NFC

With the recent release of the NFL schedule, every fan base including the Buccaneers are going through and playing the schedule game. That is, going week bye week and predicting the record for each respective team. It’s a fun way to set early expectations based on where the rosters are right now.

I know I have done the same with the Buccaneers and I constantly find myself happy with the way I expect this season to play out. Most Bucs fans expect the team to win their fifth straight NFC South title. However, I think it fair that we all collectively set our sights a little higher.

This season is the Super Bowl or bust for the Buccaneers. They are one of the top teams in the NFC and you could argue a top five team in the NFL on paper. When you add a favorable schedule into the mix then I don’t think it’s crazy at all to expect the Bucs to be the number one overall seed in the NFC this year.

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This bar might be too high for some people, but that is where this roster is at. For teams like the Philadelphia Eagles and Detroit Lions, those fans are looking for home field advantage in the playoffs. If you see the Bucs in that same top tier, like I do, then your expectations should be the same.

In fact, I would argue that the Bucs are in a much better position to reach that goal than the other top teams in the NFC. Not due to their talent because I think those three rosters are all very close in that way, but rather due to the schedule that we now know. 

The biggest thing is the quality of opponents that these three teams will all play. That starts in their own divisions. While the Bucs will play a solid Atlanta Falcons team and a Carolina Panthers team that is on the rise, that isn’t as difficult of a path as having to beat out the Minnesota Vikings or Washington Commanders who both made the playoffs last season. The NFC South is just objectively a much easier division to stack wins in.

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However, the difficulty of the schedule goes far beyond that. Just looking at the total number of playoff teams they will face in the regular season puts the Bucs at a huge advantage to win the number one overall seed. The Buccaneers will play just five teams that made the playoffs last season.

Whereas the Lions and Eagles play many more than that. More than double actually. Both the Eagles and Lions will play a playoff opponent from last year in eleven of their seventeen games in 2025. 

This will include a stretch of five consecutive playoff opponents for the Lions in weeks six through eleven. They also end their season playing three of their last four games against playoff teams. where they could easily put together a losing streak. For the Eagles, they will both start and end the season playing a stretch of four out of five playoff opponents. This means they could both start slow and fizzle out at the end.

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The Buccaneers don’t face these types of difficult stretches. The worst they will see is the Buffalo Bills and Los Angeles Rams in back to back weeks, but other than that their most difficult games are spread apart pretty evenly. I’m not saying there are weeks off in the NFL, but not having a gauntlet of playoff intensity level games for long stretches should make life easier for the Bucs. 

At this point, I’m calling it a three team race for the one seed. The Lions, Eagles and Bucs make up a clear top tier in my eyes and they all have the Super Bowl there for the taking. All three teams want home field advantage in the playoffs, but only one can have it.

That one team should be the Buccaneers. They are every bit as talented as those other two teams, but have a much easier path to get the number one seed. As we look at things here going into June, the Bucs should be expected to win thirteen or fourteen games this year and be the NFC’s number one seed in the playoffs.