Buccaneers

Raymond James Stadium sits on the Tampa waterfront, built to expand for special occasions past its listed 69,218 seats, and the Buccaneers have called it home since 1998, after two decades at Tampa Stadium down the road.

The franchise took the field in 1976 as an expansion side alongside the Seattle Seahawks and opened with a 26-game losing streak that ran across its first two seasons. The reversal came quickly enough: by 1979 Tampa Bay had won the NFC Central. Tony Dungy built the "Tampa 2" defence there through the late 1990s, and the roster he shaped — Warren Sapp, Derrick Brooks, John Lynch, Rondé Barber among them — carried the identity into the next decade, when Jon Gruden took the team to Super Bowl XXXVII and a 48–21 win over the Oakland Raiders. A second title followed under different circumstances, Super Bowl LV beating the Kansas City Chiefs 31–9. Lynch's number 47 and Barber's 21 hang retired alongside Lee Roy Selmon's 63, the three names bracketing the club's Hall of Fame contingent.

The New Orleans Saints remain the fixture that matters most inside the NFC South, sharpened further by the run of seven straight division titles from 2021 through 2024; Atlanta and Carolina fill out the divisional calendar, with Miami kept as an interconference rival under the "Sunshine Series" label.

Red, pewter, black and bay orange trace back to a club that had nowhere to play its history until it built one, at a stadium on the water in Tampa.