Practice Squad Evolution Greatly Helps Bucs Manage In-Season Roster

The Tampa Bay Buccaneers will need to reduce their roster from 80 players down to the regular-season limit of 53 by next Tuesday, but that doesn’t mean 27 former Buccaneers will be rolling out of town on Wednesday.

Thanks to practice squads that have grown to a robust 16 spots the Buccaneers and the NFL’s other 31 teams are able to retain more of the talent they have developed than ever before. And thanks to new rules that allow for more experienced players to be retained and add flexibility to how those players can be involved in regular-season action, those bigger practice squads have also grown in importance to a team’s week-to-week operation.

The Buccaneers will get a chance to form their first practice squad immediately after the league-wide round of cuts next week, and it will likely be a mix of their own recently-waived players and some others from around th league. It will also surely include both rookies and established veterans, thanks to the new rules.

Not surprisingly, the people who are involved in shaping teams’ rosters, such as Buccaneers Vice President of Player Personnel John Spytek, are quite fond of the way practice squads have evolved.

“I think it’s one of the great rules they’ve done,” said Spytek. “Not only can you have the vets there but you can elevate them on a week-to-week basis without having to actually sign them and cut someone. We’re just going to try to get the best 53 that we can and then the best 16 that we can after that, all with the understanding that injuries happen. We want any of those guys on the 16 to be ready to go in a game and be prepared and be able to uphold the standards that we have around here.”

NFL practice squads have officially existed since 1965, though they briefly were eliminated in the 1970s in favor of active roster expansion. The first Collective Bargaining Agreement in 1993 set practice squad limits at five players, where they stayed until 2004, when it was increased to eight spots. It wasn’t until 2014 that practice squads expanded again to 10 players, and then the most recent big leap in the limit came with the latest CBA enacted in 2020. That was supposed to be a gradual increase but with the league looking to give teams more flexibility to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic it went directly to 16 players.

And perhaps even more significantly, that 16-man unit is closer to being an extension of the active roster than it ever was before. That’s due to the ‘practice squad elevation’ option that the new…