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Peter Schrager Declares Tampa Bay's Epic Meltdown the Worst Loss of the NFL Season

'Thursday Night Football' turned into a house of horrors for the Buccaneers.

Kyle Koster

Baker Mayfield and Tampa Bay missed out on a great opportunity on Thursday night.
Baker Mayfield and Tampa Bay missed out on a great opportunity on Thursday night. / Nathan Ray Seebeck-Imagn Images
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Tampa Bay squandered its chance to carry sole possession of first place in the NFC South into the weekend by melting down the stretch to allow the Atlanta Falcons to mount a shocking Thursday Night Football comeback. Everyone on the Bucs sideline knew in the moment just how disastrous the turn of events could be, and there was a lot of emotion on display after the final whistle.

If there's any bright spot for Tampa Bay it's the fact that it will get two cracks at the Carolina Panthers over the season's final three weeks, and those outcomes will largely decide which team gets a playoff spot.

But make no mistake. It was a very bad loss.

How bad?

Let Get Up's Peter Schrager explain.

"It's the single worst loss that any team has suffered this entire NFL season," he said on Friday's show.

"You consider the stakes and what was at cost here," he continued. "That's an eliminated team already, the Atlanta Falcons. They're playing without Drake London, their best wide receiver ... It's third-and-28 and they allow this, out of the backfield, big chunk. Then you have a fourth-and-14, an inexplicable David Sills finds the opening, gets it and they lose this way. They were up 14 points in the fourth quarter to a team that's already been eliminated. At home. And by the way, the Falcons had 19 penalties last night! Inexplicable. If you're a Tampa Bay Buccaneers fan you are sick."

All of this checks out.

Tampa Bay was not long ago seen as a contender to get the NFC's only bye after a 5-1 start. Baker Mayfield MVP chatter was abundant. It seemed like a foregone conclusion that they would, at worse, cruise into a home playoff game.

It's a much different story right now and if they can't rebound from what Schrager accurately describes as the season's worse loss, they'll have a long offseason to think about all that went wrong.

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Kyle Koster
KYLE KOSTER

Kyle Koster is an assistant managing editor at Sports Illustrated covering the intersection of sports and media. He was formerly the editor in chief of The Big Lead, where he worked from 2011 to '24. Koster also did turns at the Chicago Sun-Times, where he created the Sports Pros(e) blog, and at Woven Digital.

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