Terrible predictions from the past, Tampa Bay Buccaneers edition

Summertime is a season for relaxation, realization, and reflection.

In the spirit of it, I’m going to come clean about my worst Tampa Bay prediction.

While I could have very easily gone the route of owning up to defending the Roberto Aguayo draft choice, I think our fearless leader Gil Arcia did a fine job admitting his own culpability in it.

No instead, let’s reminisce on the time that I said that the Buccaneers would make the playoffs in 2015.

I wrote this in August of that year for the FSView & Florida Flambeau:

I have four times had hope for the Buccaneers to be good. One was in 2010, when they went 10-6 but missed the playoffs, and the other two were Greg Schiano’s years as head coach, because i’m a fool who thought that an insane man could somehow not implode a team while simultaneously ruining the career of Tampa’s all-time passing touchdown record holder and infecting the team with MRSA.

The fourth, as you may have guessed, is this year, and I can imagine you can also guess why I am hopeful. Switching Jameis Winston for Josh McCown is the biggest of several reasons why I think the Buccaneers, at the very least, will be a wild-card playoff team.

The 2015 season, in case you needed a refresher, started with a blowout home loss against the Tennesse Titans (and pseudo-Jameis rival Marcus Mariota) and ended with a 6-10 record and a fired Lovie Smith.

While there were plenty of highlights that season (Doug Martin’s revitalization, to name one) there were plenty of other lows. The Bucs, in fact, were in the smallest possibility of playoff contention for a brief moment, standing at 6-6 at the beginning of December, but lost four straight at the end of the season to erase hopes of that.

Some may point to the Titans game as the worst point of the season, due to the crushing of any opening day enthusiasm one might have had coming at the hand of the quarterback the Bucs might’ve picked, but to me, it comes from the blown 24-0 lead against Washington, if only because it brought Kirk Cousins’ god-awful “YOU LIKE THAT?” into the world.

I stand by the prediction in the moment, though. In the end, six of the Buccaneers 10 losses could have been wins, and I know that almost only counts in horseshoes, but it still serves as a reflection of how close the team was. Tampa Bay has been one of the unluckiest teams in the 2010s, and 2015 serves as one of the biggest examples of that.

What are some of your worst predictions regarding the Bucs? Sound off in the comments.