The final month of the 2025 season has arrived and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers are still within reach of a record fifth straight NFC South title. A run of four losses in five weeks has kept that ultimate regular-season goal at arm’s length, however, and the Buccaneers find themselves in a tie atop the division with the Carolina Panthers, as both teams are 7-6. Three of the last four games for both of those teams are against division foes, including two upcoming head-to-head battles.
The first of those three division games, and the sole focus for the Buccaneers in Week 15, is a visit from the Atlanta Falcons on Thursday night for a nationally televised game on Amazon Prime Video. Tampa Bay will be trying to maintain “control of its own destiny,” as they say, while the 4-9 Falcons will surely be stimulated by the opportunity to play spoiler against their not-so-friendly division rivals. A loss to Seattle on Sunday officially ended Atlanta’s playoff hopes but it shouldn’t do too much to dampen their motivation at Raymond James Stadium.
The Buccaneers might actually be pleased by the short week turnaround from a Sunday game to a Thursday night affair, as it won’t give them much time to dwell on a Week 14 loss to a two-win New Orleans squad. Head Coach Todd Bowles said the Bucs are handling business as they should to rebound from that disappointing result.
“Professionally,” said Bowles. We lost [Sunday] and we’ve got to get over it. We’ve got be big boys, we’ve got to get over it and own what we did, and we’ve got to get better at things we need to get better at. We’ve got to look in the mirror – we understand that as a group we’ve been through this before, but it’s different every single year and every time [we] do it. Nobody likes to lose, and you’re coming on a short week, a chance to get the bad taste out of your mouth, but they should be upset. They should own what they do, we as coaches own what we do, and as a team own what we do, and we’ve got to come out Thursday and we’ve got to correct them.”
The Bucs are relying on walk-throughs in the short week rather than full-speed practices, not only due to the condensed schedule but also a rather lengthy injury list. The work is primarily mental, particularly in terms of handling the varied pressure from a Falcons’ defense that ranks third in the NFL in sacks-per-pass play rate, and quarterback Baker Mayfield explained that the way to make that work is to keep talking.
“Just overcommunicate when we start to get the game plan in,” he said. “You have to squeeze a couple of days into one. Overcommunicate what the looks we’re expecting, what the checks are, the alerts, especially when it comes to blitz pickup stuff. For me, that’s the really important part just because they pressure a lot. They bring a bunch of different fronts, different pressures, guys kind of all over, so that’s really the emphasis for us this week. After that, it’s just overcommunicating what we’re trying to get done.”
Tampa Bay’s defense will have to communicate as well to slow down running back Bijan Robinson, who leads the NFL with 1,683 yards from scrimmage. In their Week One win in Atlanta, the Buccaneers limited Robinson to just 24 yards on 12 carries…but also allowed him to catch six passes for 100 yards and a touchdown.
“It is going to take all 11 [players], even the backside cornerback,” said Run Game Coordinator/Outside Linebackers Coach Larry Foote. “We show those guys videos — everybody knows he has that ability. If you want to break it down, he can jump-cut, he can get east and west faster than anybody, so when I say all 11 [players] and backside cornerbacks, backside guys [have] to do their job. That being said, you [have] to attack at the same time. It’s going to take all 11 guys to get him on the ground. He’s just that dangerous and we [have] to understand angles and how to attack him.”
And then there is the matter of Kirk Cousins, the 14th-year veteran who is back in the saddle for Atlanta after young quarterback Michael Penix was lost for the season to a knee injury in November. Cousins is not having his finest season from a statistical standpoint in a small sample size of four games, with three touchdowns, three interceptions and a passer rating of 76.5, but he has a history of coming up big against the Buccaneers. In five starts against Tampa Bay during his career, Cousins has thrown 14 touchdown passes against just two interceptions, has averaged 334.2 passing yards per outing and has a 116.1 passer rating.
“He’s always got the ball out [quick], that’s what makes him one of the best in this league,” said Foote. “He knows what to do with the ball, that’s the challenge. Defensive backs, linebackers, everybody [must] understand we [have] to know our zones, our techniques, and [have] to know what he wants to do. That being said, we [have] to get a pass rush too. He’s seen every coverage in this league, so we have to win our one-on-one matchups.”
Robinson and Cousins are two of a myriad of challenges the Falcons will present to the Buccaneers on Thursday night as they try to forge a series split and Tampa Bay tries to maintain that control of its own destiny.
“For the most part, we know the ball is still in our court,” said cornerback Jamel Dean. “We just have to take it one game at a time and just correct the mistakes that we made from last game and just build on that.”
GAME AND BROADCAST DETAILS
Atlanta Falcons (4-9) at Tampa Bay Buccaneers (7-6)
Thursday, December 11, 8:15 p.m. ET
Raymond James Stadium (capacity: 65,844)
TV Broadcast Team: Al Michaels (play-by-play), Kirk Herbstreit (analyst), Kaylee Hartung (reporter)
Radio: 98Rock (WXTB, 97.9 FM), Flagship Station
Radio Broadcast Team: Gene Deckerhoff (play-by-play), Dave Moore (analyst), T.J. Rives (reporter)
Spanish Radio: 96.1 Caliente
Spanish Radio Broadcast Team: Carlos Bohorquez (play-by-play), Martin Gramática (analyst), Santiago Gramática (reporter)
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ALL-TIME HEAD-TO-HEAD SERIES
When Atlanta comes to town on Thursday night it will be an opportunity for the Buccaneers to regain the lead in the two teams’ all-time head-to-head series. If they do so, it would mark the 10th time that the lead in the series has changed hands. With a 23-20 win in Atlanta in this year’s season opener, the Buccaneers tied things up, 32-32. Baker Mayfield threw three touchdown passes in the Bucs’ comeback victory, including the 25-yard game-winner to rookie Emeka Egbuka with less than a minute to play.
Atlanta engineered the ninth lead change in the series by sweeping both games in 2024. The Falcons first tied the series up in Week Five with a 36-30 overtime win in Mercedes-Benz Stadium. The game was tied four different times, the last when Kirk Cousins was able to spike the ball with one second left in regulation to set up Younghoe Koo’s 52-yard field goal. Atlanta got the ball first in overtime and won on a 45-yard catch-and-run by KhaDarel Hodge. Cousins threw for 509 yards and four touchdowns. Just three weeks later, the two teams met again in Tampa and this one also came down to the wire. After Mayfield hit Cade Otton on a four-yard touchdown pass with seven minutes to play, the home team still trailed, 31-26. Atlanta was able to burn six minutes off the clock with their final possession and the Bucs could advance only to the Atlanta 33 before one last crack at the end zone was incomplete.
In 2023, the Falcons initially tied the series up at 30-30 with a 16-13 win at Raymond James Stadium, but the Bucs took the lead back later in the season with a 29-25 victory in Atlanta. The first of those games was also tied three times, at 7-7, 10-10 and 13-13, before Koo won it at the buzzer with a 51-yard field goal. Mike Evans scored the Bucs’ only touchdown on a 40-yard catch, and safety Antoine Winfield Jr. kept his team alive in the fourth quarter with a remarkable forced fumble at the goal line against quarterback Desmond Ridder. In the rematch, Ridder put the Falcons ahead, 25-22, with three minutes left on a six-yard touchdown keeper but Mayfield was able to counter that with a 12-play, 75-yard drive ending in his 11-yard touchdown pass to Otton. Overall, the Buccaneers have won six of the last 10 meetings in the series but Atlanta has won three of the last four.
Since the Bucs and Falcons became fellow NFC South denizens in 2002, the Bucs have a slight head-to-head lead, 23-22. The Bucs’ longest winning streak in the series is six, between 1997 and 2003; the Falcons have won five in a row on two occasions, first from 2008-10 and again from 2016-18.
The Falcons won the 2022 regular-season finale, a contest in which the Buccaneers, having already been locked into the fourth seed in the NFC playoff field, rested many of their starters and pulled most of the rest early in the contest. Ridder, in just his fourth career start, threw for 224 yards and two touchdowns and Atlanta’s defense held the Bucs to 222 total yards of offense.
Earlier in the 2022 season, the Buccaneers held on to a 21-15 victory despite a late Atlanta comeback. Tampa Bay controlled the action for three quarters and used two Leonard Fournette touchdowns to take a 21-0 lead into the final period before Atlanta stormed back with two touchdowns. After an Olamide Zaccheaus touchdown catch made it a one-score game, the Bucs’ offense was able to drain the final 4:38 from the clock with one long drive.
The Bucs’ two wins in 2021 were both by double-digit margins. In Week at Raymond James Stadium, the Buccaneers got five touchdown passes from Tom Brady, including two each to Mike Evans and Rob Gronkowski – plus Mike Edwards’ two fourth-quarter pick-sixes as an exclamation in a 48-25 victory. In the rematch in in Atlanta, Chris Godwin set a team single-game record with 15 catches and Gronkowski once again found the end zone twice in Tampa Bay’s 13-point win. Russell Gage, who is now a Buccaneer, caught 11 passes for 130 yards for the Falcons.
Prior to briefly retaking the series lead in 2021, the Buccaneers had been on top with a 24-22 advantage midway through the 2016 season before Atlanta reeled off five straight victories in a streak that included sweeps in 2017 and 2018. Tampa Bay has the all-time edge in scoring in the series, with 1,459 points to the Falcons’ 1,354.
In their run to the Super Bowl championship in 2020, the Buccaneers won eight straight spanning the regular season and the postseason, and they downed the Falcons twice in the final three weeks of the regular season, scoring a total of 75 points. Tampa Bay won, 31-27, at Atlanta in Week 15 and then took the rematch in Tampa by a 44-27 margin. The first win required a wild comeback after the Falcons raced out to a 17-0 halftime lead, with Tom Brady throwing for 330 yards and two touchdowns in the second half. The second game at Raymond James Stadium was less stressful, as the Buccaneers led from wire to wire, but included another huge day by Brady, who threw for 399 yards and four touchdowns.
The Buccaneers came close to taking both halves of the series in 2019, winning by a 35-22 score in Atlanta and taking a 22-16 lead into the fourth quarter in the Week 17 rematch in Tampa. However, Matt Ryan led a game-tying drive in the final three minutes of that contest, leading to Koo’s 33-yard field goal as time expired in regulation. The Buccaneers won the overtime coin toss but lost the game on the first play of the extra period, as Jameis Winston’s last pass for Tampa Bay was picked off and returned 27 yards for a touchdown by Deion Jones.
Both of the games in 2018 went down to the wire, neither ending well for the Buccaneers. In Week Six in Atlanta, Tampa Bay rallied from a 15-point deficit to make it a 31-29 game with four minutes to play on Peyton Barber’s five-yard touchdown catch. The Falcons then tacked on a field goal to make it a five-point game with just over a minute to play but Winston got the visitors back into scoring range with consecutive completions of 18, 18 and 19 yards to DeSean Jackson, Mike Evans and Adam Humphries. With seven seconds left and the ball at Atlanta’s 21, the Bucs tried a tricky play in which Winston began to scramble up the middle and then suddenly attempted a lateral to Humphries. The ball ended up on the turf before Evans scooped it up and got a one-hopper off to Jackson, who appeared to have a path to the end zone pylon along the left sideline. However, Jackson couldn’t haul it in and time expired on a 34-29 Falcons victory.
In the Week 17 rematch, at Raymond James Stadium, the Bucs gave up a 10-point halftime lead and fell behind by 11 in the fourth quarter before once again rallying, this time taking the lead with five minutes to play on a 19-yard Chris Godwin touchdown catch. That was too much time to leave Ryan, however, and he hit Jones on a pair of 16-yard passes to get the ball into field goal range. Matt Bryant won it as time expired with a 37-yarder.