Over the past two weeks, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers have looked more and more like the team we thought we were going to see from the get-go of the 2019 season.
With back-to-back road wins over the Atlanta Falcons and Jacksonville Jaguars, the Bucs find themselves at 5-7 and are hitting their stride as they approach the final four games of the regular season.
There dominant performance against the Jags Sunday helped propel Tampa Bay up six spots in the latest USA TODAY NFL Power Rankings, jumping from 23 to 17.
But, ESPN feels differently about the Bucs, and in their newest power rankings Tampa Bay comes in at just 22, behind both the Cleveland Browns (5-7), Los Angeles Chargers (4-8) and even the Carolina Panthers (5-7), who lost at home Sunday to the Washington Redskins.
The Browns, meanwhile, lost on the road in Week 13 to the Pittsburgh Steelers, who were playing their third string quarterback Devlin Hodges. The Chargers lost a tight one in Denver against the Broncos, and have looked nothing like the team that went on the road and beat Baltimore in last year’s playoffs.
Tampa Bay has been one of the hottest teams in the league the past two weeks, so only moving them up one spot while allowing the dumpster fire that is the Browns and Panthers to rank ahead of them seems disrespectful to the boys in the bay.
Hopefully, another convincing win in Week 14 will make ESPN see the error of their ways.
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