In the NFL, Cover 4 refers to a defensive coverage that aims to cover four deep zones on the field. Following that lead, I’m going to provide you with the same coverage of the Bucs – your favorite football team.

Each Wednesday morning I’ll cover four areas as they apply to Tampa Bay: 1. a short film breakdown, 2. a finance angle, 3. a look forward at what’s to come, and 4. a bit of fun.

Film: Al-Quadin Muhammad’s 2025 Sacks

Al-Quadin Muhammad arrives in Tampa Bay off a career year in Detroit where he had 11 sacks, 53 pressures, nine tackles for loss – all on roughly 41 percent of Detroit’s defensive snaps. On paper it is the most productive pass rush season of his career by a wide margin, and it is fair to ask how a player who had never topped six sacks in a season suddenly posted 11 of them at age 30.

Sacks come in all shapes and sizes. Some are clean wins in one-on-one situations. Others are scheme generated. Still others are of the cleanup variety.

It’s a big reason why sacks are notoriously unreliable predictors of … well … future sacks.

But they can still give us an idea of how a player tries to win. Muhammad made it to the passer before he got the ball out a total of 12 times in 2025 – 10 solo sacks and two half-credits. I went back to watch all 12 to see how often he had clean wins, how often he cleaned up, and in what ways he tried to win.

What those 12 plays show is a high-motor player who will take advantage of opportunities other players give him. If a quarterback wants to climb, leak, roll or otherwise scramble, you can bet that AQM will be ready to make him pay for that decision. Almost every one of his sacks came very late in the rep. That’s backed up by his 4.94 second time to sack average for the season.

That makes him the perfect complement to havoc creators Yaya Diaby and especially rookie Rueben Bain Jr. I’d bet that Muhammad will get at least two sacks this year by virtue of cleaning up chaos created by the two edge rushers up the depth chart from him.

Bucs OLB Al-Quadin Muhammad – Photo by: IMAGN Images – Junfu Han

Beyond the cleanups, Muhammad used a variety of tricks to beat tackles last year. He paired a bull rush with an arm-over against Braxton Jones, dislodged Jaylon Moore with a club/shove, used a long arm to keep Ronnie Stanley from finding a grip, forced Charlie Heck to short his pass set before dipping underneath him, hit Terrance Steele with a chop-rip and came back to the speed-to-power against Justin Skule. It’s a varied-enough bag with a wide range of effectiveness. On multiple reps he showed solid bend alongside some of these other techniques.

Muhammad’s best trait is his hand usage. He has pop to his mitts and uses them to break tackles arms and keep them disconnected. His rip is clean and might be his best tool. He has power in his bull rush, but it loses its effectiveness because he isn’t terribly quick off the snap. Out of those 12 reps only one featured a quick snap jump from Muhammad. That was when he beat Jaylon Moore of Kansas City.

The most interesting sack of the entire bunch to me was his half sack against Lamar Jackson. That featured him lined up as a 3-technique with his hand in the dirt. On a six-man rush Muhammad looped two gaps over and bent around Tyler Linderbaum before combining with Alex Anzalone to hunt down a scrambling Jackson in the backfield. He should expect to be used more like that in Todd Bowles’ stunt-heavy pressure defense.

All of this makes for an intriguing situational pass rusher. Muhammad is the modern-day renaissance pass rusher. He has an understanding of just about everything you would want a designated pass rusher to do, but a mastery of none. But when paired with his relentlessness it’s enough to be the perfect OLB3 or OLB4 on the depth chart on a low risk, one-year deal.

Here is a cut up off all 12 plays.

Finance: Tykee Smith’s Early Valuation

After a strong rookie season as a slot corner, Tykee Smith moved to top-side safety role in 2025 and recorded 94 tackles, 23 defensive stops, six passes defensed and one interception. Many of his stats went up, but his ability in coverage was a roller coaster with plenty of downs to just a few ups.

Looking at just the two seasons in isolation, Smith’s best path to maximizing his future payday would call for a return to the slot. But that doesn’t look like his path forward with the Bucs. 

Smith’s archetype at this point in his career is a half-field/box safety with slot versatility and a coverage limitation in space. Those players can get solid mid-tier deals, but unless they are dynamic playmakers like Los Angeles’ Derwin James or Baltimore’s Kyle Hamilton, they rarely break the bank.

I found three players who signed contracts this offseason who I think bracket Smith’s archetype and production well. They are Cincinnati’s Bryan Cook, Dallas’ Jalen Thompson and Kansas City’s Alohi Gilman.

Cook represents the best case scenario for Smith. A useful, but limited player who maximizes his versatility. Gilman is the floor as someone who has to be schemed around. Smith has a higher upside than Gilman, even if his 2025 shows a weaker coverage player. He’s capable of more.

Thompson is the 50th percentile outcome, and ironically, the guy who is still playing the most slot snaps – where Smith is at his best. This puts Smith’s valuation right around Thompson’s three-year, $33 million deal. We’ll see if he can increase his worth with a strong 2026 season before his contract year in 2027.

Bucs SS Tykee Smith – Photo by: Cliff Welch/PR

Forecast: Emeka Egbuka’s 2026 Stat Line

Projecting any player’s stats from one year to the next is a tricky proposition, for sure. Fantasy football analysts have built an entire cottage industry out of it. But it’s the summer and there’s no harm in taking a stab at it.

It’s easy to think that Emeka Egbuka will top 1,000 yards in 2026. He came awfully close to doing it last year, in what was ultimately a very up-and-down, but still extremely promising, rookie season. Rather than project a full season total, which assumes full health, I am going to put together the framework for per game production. From there you can extrapolate over however many games you like.

Last year Egbuka averaged 7.5 targets, 3.7 catches, 55.2 yards, and 0.35 touchdowns per game in 17 games.

Bucs WR Emeka Egbuka – Photo by: Cliff Welch/PR

Plenty has changed since 2025. Mike Evans is gone. But Chris Godwin Jr. is healthier than he was this time last year, and Jalen McMillan has seemingly fully recovered from the neck injury he suffered in the preseason last year.

The Bucs also added Ted Hurst in the third round of the 2026 NFL Draft. All that is to say there is a decent chance Egbuka becomes the number one target for Baker Mayfield this year, replacing Evans. But there is just as likely a chance that, with better health across the entire room, his target share does not actually increase from 2025, when he went large swaths of the season without the three other receivers who were supposed to round out the top four.

That is why I have him down for similar routes and targets in his sophomore season, with improved catch efficiency and a reduced yards per reception. The per game framework comes out to 32.0 routes, 7.5 targets, 4.5 catches, 58.7 yards, and 0.35 touchdowns, at 13.0 yards per catch and 1.83 yards per route run. Those last two are rates, so they hold steady no matter how many games you run it over. The counting stats are where the sample size does its work.

Will any of this hold up? Probably not to the decimal. Health, role, and Baker Mayfield’s distribution will all have their say, and a receiver room that stays whole could keep his target share right where it was.

The fair expectation is that his efficiency improves, specifically his reliability and his catch rate, but some of that gain gets offset by a dip in explosive play rate as his average depth of target settles and the chunk plays come a little less often. But the framework holds even if the games played don’t. Per game, Egbuka should be a more efficient, more reliable version of the receiver we saw flash last September. Pick your number of games and do the math.

Fun Fourth Down: Bucs Players As Pop Culture Characters

Last week I wrote three of the most fun paragraphs I have ever written in my entire career when describing Oregon defensive tackle A’Mauri Washington as a prospect.

“My best way at describing who he is versus who he can be is Robert Doback’s explanation of his childhood in the phenomenal comedy, Step Brothers.

“When I was a kid, when I was a little boy, I always wanted to be a dinosaur. I wanted to be a Tyrannosaurus Rex more than anything in the world. I made my arms short and I roamed the backyard, I chased the neighborhood cats, I growled and I roared. Everybody knew me and was afraid of me. And one day my dad said, ‘Bobby, you are 17. It’s time to throw childish things aside,’ and I said, ‘Okay, Pop.’ But he didn’t really say that, he said, ‘Stop being a f*cking dinosaur and get a job.’”

Washington’s current playstyle – where he tries to win with speed and agility, beating blockers laterally – is his Tyrannosaurus Rex. But it’s time he throws away childish things, lower his pad level and start bullying opponents. That’s how he is going to get an NFL job.”

That prompted me to think about current Bucs players and any pop culture comps that felt natural. I found four that felt right.

Reuben Bain Jr. as Bane from the Dark Knight Rises

The name does most of the work, sure. But watch him break offensive tackles like Bane broke Batman. Unrelenting. Unyielding. The walk past the mirror on draft night said everything that needed to be said. All business. No distractions.

The rest of us adopted the darkness. He was born in it.

Luke Goedeke as Louis Litt from Suits

Think back to season one Louis Litt from the series Suits. The epitome of an antagonist. You couldn’t stand him. Absolutely no endearing qualities to be found. Then something happens across the run of the show. The armor comes off, the heart shows, and by the end he is the character you would run through a wall for. 

Luke Goedeke ran that exact arc with the Bucs. As a rookie in 2022 he was the thorn in every Bucs fan’s side. A guard who struggled so badly he played his way onto the bench. What came after was nearly as poetic as Litt’s turn. He kicked out to right tackle, he found himself, and he hardened into one of the best tackles in all of football.

Same villain to hero pipeline. Fewer mud baths. 

Bucky Irving as Joey from Blossom

This one needs a little more setup, especially if you came up after the Clinton administration. In the TV show Blossom, Joey Lawrence played the lovable Russo brother whose entire personality was summed up in one word he often repeated – Whoa!

That word is what all of us find ourselves exclaiming every time Bucky Irving makes a defender miss. Linebacker has him dead to rights in the hole? Miss. “Whoa!” An athletic corner/safety duo has him cornered at the edge. Poof! He’s gone! “Whoa!” As he breaks ankle after ankle after ankle all we are left saying is “Whoa!”

That’s Joey Russo to a “t.”

Bucs RB Bucky Irving – Cliff Welch/PR

Antoine Winfield Jr. as Huey Freeman from Boondocks

Every great defense needs one guy who already knows what is coming. Huey Freeman from Boondocks is the one in the room who has read three more books than everyone else and is usually right. He is calm while the chaos spins around him. That is Antoine Winfield Jr. on a football field. He diagnoses the play before the snap, he is always a half second early to the spot, and he does it without a wasted motion or a wasted word.

The rest of the defense reacts. Winfield anticipates. Quietly the smartest man on the grass.