Buccaneers cornerbacks ranked horribly low by Pro Football Focus

The Tampa Bay Buccaneers have bad cornerbacks. This is not a surprise to anyone who's watched the Bucs play this year, as they managed to allow 31 touchdowns to just 11 interceptions and a weak 6.6 net yards per attempt. It was also obvious by the fact that the Bucs didn't have a single cornerback with more than nine starts, and almost none of that variation in cornerback line-ups was due to injury. The coaches obviously did not like the play of any of their defensive backs.

So when Pro Football Focus put out its cornerback rankings, no one was surprised the Bucs' cornerbacks looked really bad. The highest-ranked Tampa Bay cornerback was Sterling Moore, all t he way down at number 66. Undrafted rookie Jude Adjei-Barimah came in at 83, while Alterraun Verner was 92nd, Mike Jenkins 100th and  Johnthan Banks all the way down at number 105.

Those are some pretty horrific rankings. Essentially, none of the Bucs cornerbacks deserved to be starters on NFL teams, and most of them shouldn't even have been backups. At least, if we can believe Pro Football Focus' evaluations -- and there's good reason to be skeptical of the way they evaluate play, especially when it comes to coverage. At the same time, these numbers pretty much conform to what we saw on tape, and the statistics.

Ironically, the team's best cornerback is set to be a free agent. The Bucs may want to think about re-signing Sterling Moore so that they at least have some kind of reasonably reliable talent in the secondary. Then again, Moore was inexplicably benched against the Panthers as they decided to give Banks and Jenkins more playing time -- which didn't exactly work.

Regardless, this shows pretty clearly what the Bucs have to do this offseason: add talent to the secondary. A lot of it.