Against which team will the Buccaneers' kick off their quest for a fifth straight division title? We take our annual stab at predicting Tampa Bay's Week One matchup before the NFL schedule drops

Scott Smith

The Tampa Bay Buccaneers have won four straight NFC South division titles, and in each of those four seasons they started the regular season off with a victory; in fact, they won their first two games each time. All four of those seasons had their ups and downs and the Buccaneers notably rebounded from midseason lulls to surge back into playoff contention in both 2023 and 2024. Early victories don't count any more than ones in December, but they do put a team in a better position to succeed.

Who will try to end the Bucs' season-opening streak in 2025? That information will be officially released on Wednesday evening as the NFL drops its full 272-game schedule in a prime-time televised event. (Here's how to watch.) Prior to that, I'm going to try our hand at predicting that Week One opponent with three (hopefully) educated guesses below.

First off, here are the 17 choices:

Home 49ers, Cardinals, Eagles, Falcons, Jets, Panthers, Patriots, Saints

Away Bills, Dolphins, Falcons, Lions, Panthers, Rams, Saints, Seahawks, Texans

The first step in this exercise, as always, is to eliminate as many options as possible. One elimination is easy: The Philadelphia Eagles are your defending Super Bowl champions and thus will be featured in the Thursday night Kickoff Game at home in Week One. The Eagles will be playing host to the Dallas Cowboys that evening, which would prevent them from coming to Raymond James Stadium that weekend.

And that it's this year, which isn't very helpful. In previous years we've been able to eliminate a small handful of games either through the Bucs playing in an International Game or some other scheduling issue. So I'll go out on a limb with another possible elimination that is really just theoryand maybe some wishful thinking.

I'm betting this is finally the year that the Buccaneers will be back in the Thanksgiving rotation. They've only played one Thanksgiving game ever, at Dallas in 2006, and that was nearly two decades ago. How about the Bucs at the Lions this year? That's a matchup of two top NFC playoff contenders, two former number-one overall picks at quarterback and two teams that have had a very entertaining recent history. Just last year the Bucs pulled off a bit of an upset in Detroit in Week Two, avenging what had been a tight loss at Ford Field in the playoffs eight months earlier. Okay, yes, I pretty much made this exact same prediction last year (when the Bucs were on the respective home schedules of both the Cowboys and Lions), only to see Tampa Bay shunned yet again, but that only makes me more adamant it's going to happen this year.

So we've still got 15 options, so it's tougher than ever this year. You'll see that two of my three picks were home games, and the Buccaneers started at home last year. However, they've been on the road in Week One in six of the last nine years, so I'm not worried about giving them two straight openers at home.

So here are my guesses, in no particular order:

1. Los Angeles Rams (away)

I was briefly concerned to see the Rams on the Eagles' home schedule, because a rematch of a very good playoff game between those teams last year could have been very attractive to the NFL schedule-makers. But then it occurred to me that Washington is also on the Eagles' home schedule, and those two teams met in the NFC Championship Game, so that's an even better rematch.

Aaaand, I was wrong. As noted above, the NFL is sending Dallas to Philadelphia for the Kickoff Game instead, which will apparently be the first Week One meeting between the Cowboys and Eagles since 2000. That's wild.

Anyway, that leaves the Rams open to play host to the Buccaneers at SoFi Stadium on opening weekend. Heck, that's juicy enough to potentially be a featured game in Week One. Now, I don't think the Buccaneers are expecting to be on Sunday or Monday Night Football in Week One, but this would be perfect for that late-afternoon Sunday game on FOX that reaches a very large audience.

Think about it: Two playoff teams from 2024 who look well-positioned to be top NFC contenders again. Two teams with Super Bowl champions this decade; in fact, after the Buccaneers finished the 2020 season as the first team ever to win a Super Bowl in their own home stadium, the Rams promptly became the second at the end of the 2021 season. Between them, the Buccaneers and Rams have made nine forays into the playoffs over the past five seasons.

That matchup, whenever it happens, will also feature two former first-overall draft picks at quarterback who have found great success in new NFL homes. That Baker Mayfield-Matthew Stafford clash gives us two strong-armed quarterbacks who aren't afraid to rip off any throw, and they both have talented pass-catching corps that got even stronger in the offseason. The Rams added veteran Davante Adams to pair with Puka Nacua while the Buccaneers used their first-round draft pick on star Ohio State wide receiver Emeka Egbuka, who joins Mike Evans, Chris Godwin and Jalen McMillan in Tampa.

Moreover, the Buccaneers and Rams have produced some very exciting football when they've shared the field in recent years, and there may even be a hint of a rivalry there. It started in 2019 when both Evans and Godwin had huge games in Tampa Bay's first visit to Los Angeles in 26 years en route to a franchise single-game scoring record in a 55-40 decision. The next season, the Rams nipped the Bucs, 27-24, in Tampa, the Bucs' penultimate loss before they ripped off eight straight wins to take the Super Bowl LV title. The Rams also beat Tampa Bay twice in 2021, the second one a Divisional Round playoff thriller that saw Stafford and Cooper Kupp trump an incredible Tom Brady-led comeback in an eventual 30-27 win at Raymond James Stadium. The Bucs got a measure of revenge in 2022 on another Brady comeback that ended in a touchdown catch by Cade Otton with nine seconds left and a 16-13 win for the home team.

2. Carolina Panthers (home)

More than one third of the Bucs' 2025 regular-season games are against NFC South opponents, so it doesn't make sense in this guessing game to complete dismiss those six options. Two of the 16 matchups on the NFL's Week One have already been announced and both feature intra-division rivalries, with the Cowboys at the Eagles and the Chiefs at the Chargers (in Brazil). Maybe the league will front-load this year's schedule with a lot of games matching up division foes.

I'm also trying to play the odds here. It's not unusual for the Buccaneers to start a season with a game against Atlanta, Carolina or New Orleans; in fact, that happened four times in a seven-year span from 2012-18. Yet they have now gone four straight seasons without a Week One game against a division opponent. If that becomes five in a row this year, that would match the longest such streak in franchise history. What I'm saying is, I think it's time for another Bucs season to start with an NFC South opponent.

Which one? Well, the Bucs two most recent seasons that opened with a game against an NFC South team were both in New Orleans, in 2018 and 2020. The Buccaneers also started the 2016 season in Atlanta and haven't played the Panthers in Week One since 2014, which was also the last time Tampa Bay played a home game against an NFC South opponent to start a season.

The Jaguars are not on the Bucs' 2025 schedule, so we won't get a game against the team's recently-departed offensive coordinator, Liam Coen, who is the new head coach in Jacksonville. Carolina is the next closest thing, since it was just one earlier that then-Bucs Offensive Coordinator Dave Canales also left for a head coaching gig, this one in Charlotte. The Buccaneers already had two showdowns with Canales' Panthers last year, winning both, so that angle isn't quite as fresh but it's still worth considering. Quarterback Bryce Young and the Panthers played much better football in the second half of the season, and if schedule-makers look at them as a team on the rise, a Week One game against the four-time defending division champions could be a good storyline.

3. New York Jets (home)

How about an interconference prediction? The Buccaneers haven't played an AFC opponent on opening weekend in a decade, when the NFL put the Tennessee Titans in Tampa to showcase the first two picks in the 2015 draft, quarterbacks Marcus Mariota and Jameis Winston. (It should be noted that the Buccaneers were originally scheduled to play in Miami in Week One of the 2017 season, before Hurricane Irma rearranged those plans.)

It's a little easier to predict an AFC opponent for the Buccaneers these days, with the "17th game," which is always an interconference matchup, now on the schedule. That gives us five options instead of four, and of those five I'm choosing the Jets because of the Todd Bowles connection.

Bowles, of course, was the head coach of the Jets from 2015-18, which represented his first shot at the corner office before he ascended to that spot again in Tampa in 2022. The Buccaneers have not played the Jets in any of Bowles' first three seasons at the Bucs' helm, so this is the first opportunity to engage that storyline. Yes, Bowles was the Bucs' defensive coordinator in 2021 when they beat the Jets at the Meadowlands, 28-24, but that's not quite the same thing. The Jets haven't visited Tampa since 2017, when they left with a 15-10 loss with Bowles at the helm, two years before he joined Bruce Arians' Buccaneers staff.

The Jets might also be seen as a team on the rise by the schedule-makers. They already boast one of the NFL's best defenses, with top-four rankings for three seasons running, and now they have both a new head coach and a new quarterback. Aaron Glenn comes over from the Lions to take over the Jets and presumably will be able to keep that defense humming, while Justin Fields will get another shot at starting and could bring a whole new dimension to New York's offense. New York also tried to put Fields in perhaps the best offensive environment he's had by adding stud right tackle Armand Membou and play-making tight end Mason Taylor early in the draft.

If the NFL is looking to include one or two AFC-NFC matchups on the Week One slate, you could do a lot worse than Jets-Buccaneers, which at the very least would pit the league's third-best defense in 2024 against the third-best offense.