Buccanners Still A Team Very Much In Flux

The 2010 Season will be remembered for all the young players which stepped up and helped Tampa Bay attain it's first 10-win season since 2005.  Unfortunately, 2010 was also the first season the Buccaneers won 10 or more games but did not get into the NFC playoffs.

Winning 10 games does not necessarily mean the roster is stable, however great the success may feel.  In fact, for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, much less may be settled going into the offseason than is actually settled by the influx of young talent.

The table below shows the opening day and final day starting lineups for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.  These are the men selected by their coaches as the players most likely at each position to get the team started quickly on game day.  Tampa Bay uses a heavy rotation of players, so this is not an indicator of playing time necessarily.  But it is still a barometer of what the coaches believe as far as who has the right experience/talent combination for playing time on Sundays.

Players who started both the first and last games of the 2010 season are highlighted in pewter:

	Opening Day (CLE)	Season Ender (@NO)
Offense
QB	Josh Freeman	Josh Freeman
WR	Mike Williams	Mike Williams
WR	Sammie Stroughter	Maurice Stovall
TE	Kellen Winslow	Kellen Winslow
FB	Earnest Graham
TE		John Gilmore
LT	Donald Penn	Donald Penn
LG	Keydrick Vincent ***	Ted Larsen
C	Jeff Faine *	Jeremy Zuttah
RG	Davin Joseph *	Derek Hardman
RT	Jeremy Trueblood	James Lee
RB	Carnell Williams	LeGarrette Blount
Defense
LE	Kyle Moore *	Tim Crowder
DT	Gerald McCoy *	Frank Okam
DT	Roy Miller	Roy Miller
RE	Ryan Sims ***	Micheal Bennett
SLB	Quincy Black *	Adam Hayward
MLB	Barrett Ruud	Barrett Ruud
WLB	Geno Hayes	Geno Hayes
LCB	EJ Biggers	EJ Biggers
RCB	Ronde Barber	Ronde Barber
SS	Sean Jones	Sean Jones
FS	Tanard Jackson **	Cory Lynch
* Finished the Season on Injured Reserve
** Suspended by the NFL
*** No longer with the team

Only 10 players started on the opening day roster and started the final game of the season (Graham and Gilmore probably bump the count to 11 as they are situational and both were healthy for both games).  The fallout is that half the starting lineup changed over the course of the season, with six of those changes due to injury (includes Vincent, who was cut as opposed to heading for IR) and only one player cut when healthy (Ryan Sims, a point-in-time moment for the current incarnation of the Buccaneers franchise).  Also note that EJ Biggers started the first game because Aqib Talib was suspended (Talib finished the season on IR as well).

Those 11 spots which went through a change during the season:  does the incumbent earn it back during the offseason?  Does the replacement keep the spot?

Each unhighlighted position is a storyline this offseason.  Those storylines will start to evolve once the rest of the NFL finishes their season, but we won't have our final answer until the next game.

Such a long time to wait!