Buccaneers fans don’t want to move on from Doug Martin

Most Tampa Bay Buccaneers fans want to keep Doug Martin. That’s according to a poll we ran here at Bucs Nation last week, where 56% of Bucs fans wanted to keep him around on a sample of 1,556 votes.

That is a pretty sizable part of Bucs fandom, if not necessarily a representative one. And while 56% of voters want to keep him around, that’s still only a small majority with probably some voting ‘yes’ because, well, there’s no real downside to keeping him around for now.

It’s unclear what the Bucs want to do with Martin, who’s suspended for the first three games of the 2017 season and coming off a terrible year. The team has clearly been looking at running backs in the 2017 NFL draft, bringing in several of them for visits. At the same time, Martin remains on the roster and the Bucs have been noncommittal but mildly positive in their remarks the last few months.

We’ll get a better idea of how the Bucs want to handle Doug Martin after the draft. They can keep him on the roster until the third week of the regular season with no commitments whatsoever, so there’s not much point to cutting him now—though he might become trade bait. But if they do want to move on from him, they’ll draft his replacements in a couple of weeks.

Whatever they do, it doesn’t look like Bucs fans as a whole will have a big problem with their decision.