How The Buccaneers Should Approach Their RB Situation

Before we get into this Buccaneers running back situation, I want to take a small victory lap.

If you’ve read some of my other stuff, you might know I was one of those that jumped on the Sean Tucker hype train. He had a great pre-season and seemed to be trending to making a role on offense. And he did absolutely nothing in 2023. I was starting to worry he would never do anything. But Sunday, he was indeed “Baby Chubb”.

His performance though has raised a quandary. A good quandary to have, but a quandary nevertheless. What the hell do we do with our RBs? Rachaad White is still good as a pass catcher and he is better at pass blocking, Bucky Irving is great in space, and Sean Tucker might be the best pure rusher. You have three talented guys with an OC who is fantastic (provided he gets out of his own way).

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The real question is of course how good is White? Of course, people took the stats from this game and basically said White was the whole problem. However, that ignores two things: NOLA’s run defense offering absolutely no resistance and the Bucs improved scheming/o-line play. Coen has retooled the run game to play to the team’s strengths.

They are using a gap run scheme. if you don’t know what that is, it is when the offensive line blocks away from where the runner is going, leaving a defender unblocked that is picked up by a puller. The Bucs have been using that quite a bit over the past few weeks and what that has led to is better runs. Simply put, while I think Tucker is better for this scheme (if the Bucs continue to run it), but White would likely have had just as good a game.

So where do we go from here? It’s quite simple, play all three. No, not going full wishbone. But at this point, I don’t know how you can justify not giving all three some playing time. Because, all three of these guys have strengths and weaknesses. White sometimes dances around too much rather than commit to the rushing lane, Sean Tucker is average at best in pass protection, and Bucky likely can’t hold up to a full starter workload.

For RBs, I have always been of the belief you ride the hot hand until they aren’t hot. Right now, the hot hand is Tucker. Will that last for the whole season? Probably not. But, good news, they seem to have two other capable running backs that can take up the slack if one of the others falters. the one thing I would hope for is that they don’t keep it static. Even if Tucker isn’t the best in pass pro, to only run with him on the field would be detrimental as you become predictable. The real test is coming up against the Ravens. If White, Tucker, and Bucky can keep this up, then we really have something here.