The Buccaneers dropped their second straight game to an AFC East team in Week 11, falling to the Bills in Orchard Park, 44-32. They couldn’t pull out the win despite a Herculean effort from Sean Tucker. Tucker’s monster game made him the star of Week 11, but what does it mean for him, Bucky Irving and Rachaad White looking further down the road?
In this post, we’ll dive into the Bucs’ backfield rotation and see what to expect in the coming weeks and how to best attack the situation from a fantasy football perspective.
Sean Tucker shows out
Coming back to upstate New York where he starred at Syracuse, Tucker had a barnburner of a game against the Bills. He took 19 carries for 106 yards and two touchdowns while hauling in both of his two targets for 34 receiving yards and a third touchdown.
Tucker finished with a massive 37 fantasy points, the second-highest total of any player for the entire week behind only Josh Allen, who he unfortunately was going head-to-head against. Tucker’s big week didn’t come out of nowhere, since even before Sunday’s breakout, Tucker was emerging as a more effective option in Tampa Bay’s backfield than Rachaad White.
With such a massive performance, it makes sense that Tucker should have locked up an increased role moving forward, but it isn’t quite so clear-cut.
This isn’t Tucker’s first massive breakout game. Last season against the Saints, he finished with 14 carries for 136 yards and a touchdown while adding three catches for 56 more yards and a second touchdown. After that monster game, he only totaled 10 carries over the next four weeks and only had one touchdown in his final 11 games of the season.
While the situation this time is different, the players involved in the timeshare are the same. Last season, White and Irving took over the timeshare the rest of the season, and Tucker faded back into the background. Is the same thing set up to happen this year?
Bucky Irving’s long road back
The main factor to Tucker’s staying power doesn’t actually have much to do with Tucker’s ability. If Bucky Irving is ready to come back, he will likely take over the main part of the timeshare, but he’s been working his way back for a while.
Irving was off to a huge start in the first four weeks of the season. He took 71 carries for 237 rushing yards and added 19 catches on 19 targets for 193 receiving yards with two touchdowns. He played over 70% of snaps in the three full games he played, while Tucker only played three total snaps in those games.
Irving has been out since Week 4 with a shoulder subluxation and a sprained foot. He was able to return to practice for the first time last week in the buildup to the Bills game, but he wasn’t able to return quite yet. According to coach Todd Bowles, he’s expected to ramp up more this week.
Rachaad Whiteout?
White has been a veteran change-of-pace option that has platooned with Bucky Irving over the last few years. He took over right away when Irving went down and had a few big games, but he has been inefficient over the last few weeks, which led to Tucker’s larger role last week.
White seemed to wear down after playing at least 70% of snaps in the games after Irving went down. Coming out of the bye week against the Patriots, he played 50 snaps (72%) but managed only 38 rushing yards on his 10 carries. He did still hit double-digit fantasy points by adding five catches for 16 yards.
White actually still out-snapped Tucker 42-to-31 in Week 11, but he only had 51 yards on his 10 carries and two catches for 11 yards on three targets.
While his totals and his yards-per-carry are not impressive, the fact that he still played so many snaps shows how much the Bucs trust him in pass-heavy situations and how important he is to their overall game plan.
The Bottom Line
First up, let’s look short-term. The Bucs are in a brutal matchup against the Rams in Week 12. The Rams have given up the fewest fantasy points to running backs in the NFL this season, allowing only three RB touchdowns in 10 games with 76.9 rushing yards and 33.6 receiving yards against them per game. Given Tucker’s previous one-week wonder, even if Irving is out again this week, it’ll be hard to trust him in this matchup. If Irving comes back to this brutal matchup and has to share time with Tucker and White, he’ll also be extremely high-risk. If it’s possible, you probably want to avoid using any Bucs RBs this week–that’s how good the Rams’ front seven has been.
The real value, though, comes from these backs looking further ahead. In Week 13 through Week 17, they have a very juicy schedule. They face the Cardinals, Saints, Falcons, Panthers and Dolphins during the meat of the fantasy football playoffs, making whoever is getting carries for them a potential league-winner down the stretch.
Because of that incredibly favorable schedule, Tucker should be added if available in standard-sized leagues, and Irving should definitely be held in all formats. If you can hold them on your bench for this week to see how it plays out, that’s the ideal scenario.
Since Irving is coming back soon and Tucker has had fake-outs before, I would not spend a large portion of your FAAB (if your league uses it), but it all depends on how desperate you are for RB help in the playoffs. You’re probably not going to get much in Week 12, but if he can supplant Irving for any of those other games on the schedule, he could finish the season extremely strong.
