Buccaneers whiff on Derrick Morgan, have no good options left

Derrick Morgan has re-signed with the Tennessee Titans, according to Jim Wyatt, leaving the Tampa Bay Buccaneers without any good options on the defensive end market now that Brian Orakpo has signed with the Atlanta Falcons.

There's only one reliable sack artist on the market right now, and that's Greg Hardy -- convicted of domestic abuse, but those charges were dropped on re-trial after the victim declined to show up, and couldn't even be found by prosecutors. Hardy's still on the commissioner's exempt list, and likely facing a suspension, too. Aside from the moral issue, he's not someone you can rely on to start for an entire season.

Okay, so, they'll just draft a defensive end, right? Sure. But they also need to draft a quarterback, a guard, and an offensive tackle at this point. The Bucs don't have that many picks, and draft picks bust with alarming frequency. Having some reliable veterans in the building would help, if only as insurance. But because of their failure to pursue their positions of need aggressively, the Bucs are left with mediocre options like Stefen Wisniewski and Jake Long on the offensive line.

Yes, the offseason is long. Yes, they can still trade for players, wait for other veterans to be cut, or pull some magic moves out of a hat to fix their needs. But as I wrote yesterday, this is the exact same problem they faced last year: a failure to aggressively address their needs, which left them with the worst offensive line in the NFL even after trading for Logan Mankins.

And all of that was perfectly preventable. Instead, the Bucs now have a bunch of giant gaping holes on their roster, oodles of cap space, and no reliable way to address those problems.