Through the first two weeks of the 2021 regular season, Buccaneers head Bruce Arians was a pretty happy guy. His team was coming off the juice of a Super Bowl win, Tom Brady was fully integrated into Arians’ offensive concepts, and a 2-0 record with wins over the Cowboys and Falcons set a pretty nice tone for the new season.
Then, the Bucs traveled to SoFi Stadium to meet the Rams, and things fell apart pretty quickly. In a 34-24 loss, the Buccaneers — who are usually on the right side of the run defense equation — gave up 76 yards on 24 carries, and Tampa Bay’s run offense was, to put it bluntly, awful. Tom Brady was Tampa Bay’s leading rusher with 14 yards on three carries, Brady had to throw the ball far too often with far too little effect, and the Rams — who had leads of 21-7 and 31-14 in this game — were clearly the dominant team. It was Matthew Stafford who riddled Tampa Bay’s defense for four touchdowns.
“Obviously not the outcome we’re looking for,” Arians said after. “I didn’t think we played, in any phase, up to our ability today. Obviously, in the road game, we didn’t handle the noise like we should have offensively a couple of times. We’ve just got to get stops on defense, which we never did in the second half. Our pass rush didn’t get home and we had to get home to help those guys out and get it done. We didn’t score down in the red zone for the first time this year and it was a little disappointing, but we’ll bounce back next week.”
The Bucs bounced back overall to compile a 13-4 record and the NFC’s second seed, which means that they get to play host to the four-seed Rams this time. If they want to be inhospitable on the way to another NFC Championship game, here are three boxes they’ll need to check.