As relaxing and recuperative as a bye week can be for an NFL team, it goes by fast. On Monday, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers will be back on the practice field, preparing for a trip to Cleveland to take on the Browns and, in a larger sense, for a stretch run in which they will need to play their best football to achieve their goals.
The Buccaneers went into the bye week on an encouraging note, having won two in a row to retake first place in the NFC South and having put together perhaps their most complete effort of the season in their downing of the Seahawks in Munich. If they can perform the way they did in all three phases of the game in Germany, the Buccaneers will have a good chance of hanging on to that division lead.
That win over Seattle was spurred by outstanding individual performances by such team leaders as Tom Brady, Mike Evans, Devin White and Vita Vea, all team captains. The Buccaneers will likely need those four and others such as Lavonte David, Carlton Davis, Antoine Winfield Jr., Chris Godwin, Donovan Smith and Tristan Wirfs to lead the way over the next seven weeks.
And perhaps one of those players will rise above the rest to be the team’s top performer as the playoff race heats put. That’s our topic for today as we wrap up our bye week Point-Counterpoint series, which has pitted Staff Writer Brianna Dix against me in a trio of debates. The premise here is simple: We choose a topic, one of us provides an answer and then the other offers a counterargument. We started the series on Wednesday by debating what was the biggest surprise of the season to this point, then on Thursday moved on to the toughest challenge of the remainder of the regular season.
For all three discussions we are going to treat the bye week as a dividing point between the first and second “halves” of the season, even though we’re 10 games into the season with seven to go. It just flows better than “the last 41.176% of the season.”
Who will be the MVP of the second half of the Buccaneers’ season?
*Brianna: ILB Devin White *
For this topic, I am going to go with inside linebacker Devin White. Coming off recent criticism, he has stacked two back-to-back dominant performances, silencing narratives. Football is all about how a player responds to adversity and there is no better example of that than White’s production against Seattle in Munich, Germany. Just three days after his father passed away, White led the Buccaneers in tackles with nine, recorded 2.0 sacks, snapped Tampa…
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