The Bucs Are Broken, Batterred, and Losing. They Are Also One Win Away From a Championship.

It defies logic. It defies the standings. Frankly, it defies the quality of football we have watched for the last two months.

But here we are, staring down the barrel of Week 18, and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers—losers of eight of their last ten games, fresh off a sloppy, turnover-filled 20-17 defeat in Miami—are somehow still breathing.

If you are a Bucs fan, you don't know whether to buy playoff tickets or demand a refund for the season.

Following Sunday’s loss to the Dolphins, the mood in the locker room should have been funereal. The offense sputtered. Baker Mayfield, for all his late-game heroics and that touchdown strike to Jalen McMillan, looked frantic for three quarters. The defense, valiant as they were in the second half, couldn't mask the team's inability to play a complete 60 minutes.

And yet, because the football gods have a twisted sense of humor, the Carolina Panthers also choked on Sunday.

So, the script is set for this Saturday afternoon at Raymond James Stadium. It is as simple as it is undeserved: Beat the Panthers, and the Bucs win the NFC South. Again.

"This is our last chance, and it's blatantly obvious," Mayfield said after the Miami loss. He’s right. But the fact that this chance even exists is the story of the 2025 NFC South—a division that seems determined to let Tampa Bay keep its crown no matter how hard they try to give it away.

We should be writing an obituary for this season. We should be talking about how the injuries to the secondary finally caught up with Todd Bowles. We should be dissecting why this team, which looked so potent in September, forgot how to run the ball in November.

Instead, we are talking about a "Game 17" for the division title.

If the Bucs are going to salvage this wreck of a season, they need to find the identity they left somewhere back in Week 6. They need Mike Evans—who just quietly surpassed 13,000 career yards in the middle of this chaos—to be the best player on the field. They need Bucky Irving to provide more than just flashes of brilliance; they need him to sustain drives so the defense can breathe.

But mostly, they need to stop waiting for permission to win.

For weeks, Tampa Bay has played like a team waiting for the other shoe to drop. They play tight. They press. They turn the ball over in the red zone. They look like a team burdened by the expectation of a fifth straight division title rather than a team hungry for it.

Saturday against Carolina offers a clean slate. The record (7-9) doesn't matter. The ugly loss in Miami doesn't matter. The fact that Carolina beat them two weeks ago doesn't matter.

In a season that has felt like a long, slow bleed, the Bucs have been handed a tourniquet.

They don't have to be perfect on Saturday. They don't even have to be pretty. They just have to be better than the Panthers for three hours. Given how this season has gone, that might be asking a lot. But given the alternative—watching the playoffs from the couch knowing you let a golden ticket slip away—it is the only thing that matters.

The Bucs are a flawed, frustrating, limping mess of a football team. But if they win on Saturday, they will be something else, too: Champions.

One game. Winner take all. The season that refuses to die has one final breath left.

Do not blink.