The Tampa Bay Buccaneers hit the road again in Week Six for another matchup with one of the NFC’s top contenders, as they take their NFC-leading 5-1 record to Detroit to face the 4-2 Lions.The game will be played on the Monday Night Football stage, on October 20 at Ford Field, with kickoff at 7:00 p.m. ET and ESPN set to broadcast it nationally during a MNF double-header.
The Buccaneers moved to the head of the conference pack with their 30-19 win in Week Six over the San Francisco 49ers, which had been a matchup of 4-1 teams. The previous Sunday, the Bucs had traveled to Seattle for a contest between two first-place teams and had come away with a 38-35 victory. Tampa Bay’s win over the 49ers marked its first game this season that was decided by more than one score. Following an injury to standout rookie Emeka Egbuka, MVP candidate Baker Mayfield kept the offense humming by throwing darts to young receivers Tez Johnson and Kameron Johnson, as well as veteran Sterling Shepard. Both Johnsons scored their first career NFL touchdown. Meanwhile, Tampa Bay’s defense sacked 49ers quarterback Mac Jones six times, two by Yaya Diaby, and both Kindle Vildor and Jamel Dean secured interceptions.
The Lions saw a four-game winning streak snapped on Sunday night in Week Six when they lost a 30-17 decision in Kansas City. Jared Goff still threw two touchdown passes to raise his season total to an NFL-leading 14, and Aidan Hutchinson added one of three sacks of Patrick Mahomes. Both of those stars are off to All-Pro-level starts to the 2025 season; Goff has an NFL best 120.6 passer rating and has only been picked off twice, while Hutchinson has already racked up six sacks. Goff is backed up by a powerful two-headed backfield, as Jahmyr Gibbs has 390 rushing yards, four touchdowns and a 4.5-yards per carry average and David Montgomery has 334 rushing yards, four touchdowns and a 5.1-yards per carry average. Safety Kerby Joseph, who was a first-team Associated Press All-Pro last season after securing a league-leading nine interceptions, has picked up where he left off with three more picks in 2025.
Here are four major storylines and four head-to-head player battles to keep an eye on in Week Seven as the Bucs prepare for another game critical to the NFC standings, this time in the national spotlight.
TOP STORYLINES
Battle of Attrition – From the 49ers’ defense to the Seahawks’ secondary to the Chargers’ offensive line, there are plenty of NFC contenders who are dealing with widespread injury issues, so a pair of banged-up rosters doing battle on Monday night is not big news. Still, the nature of the rashes of injuries sustained by the Buccaneers and Lions adds a level of mystery to one phase of the game in particular: Tampa Bay’s passing attack versus Detroit’s secondary. The Buccaneers started their Week Six game against the 49ers without Mike Evans, Chris Godwin and Jalen McMillan, then lost Egbuka to a hamstring strain before halftime. Evans has a chance to return for the Monday night game but Godwin and McMillan won’t and Egbuka is a serious question mark. The Buccaneers will continue to lean heavily on the aforementioned Tez and Kam Johnson as well as the veteran Shepard but their offense would obviously be more important with some of those injured pass-catchers on the field. Meanwhile, the Lions, whose defense was hit extremely hard by injuries in 2024, are having some of the same woes in 2025, with cornerbacks D.J. Reed, Terrion Arnold and Ennis Rakestraw all on injured reserve and safety Brian Branch potentially serving a one-game suspension in Week Seven. Arnold, Branch and Rakestraw were all first or second-round picks in recent drafts and Reed was the team’s most important offseason addition in free agency. In addition, cornerback Avonte Maddox could miss a second straight game with a hamstring injury. The Lions have had to do a lot of shuffling in their secondary over the past 14 months and they may need to do some more if Branch’s suspension is upheld and Maddox is sidelined.
A Leg Up in a Crowded NFC Race – The Buccaneers have already banked wins over NFC teams that currently have winning records in Week One at Atlanta, Week Five at Seattle and Week Six against San Francisco. The Lions have beaten the 3-2 Bears but lost to the 3-1-1 Packers in Week One. While the AFC has five teams with one or fewer wins through six weeks, the NFC playoff race looks increasingly crowded each successive week. Eleven of the 16 teams in the NFC are sit between 5-1 and 3-3, and all four teams in the Lions’ division are over .500. The Buccaneers will still be in first place after Week Seven regardless of the outcome on Monday night, but they suddenly have a pair of streaking teams in the 3-2 Falcons and 3-3 Panthers breathing down their neck. The Lions have the most wins in the NFC North through six weeks but are technically not in first place because the Packers have a better winning percentage (.700 to .667). Neither the Buccaneers nor Lions will be guaranteed a spot at the NFC playoff table with a win on Monday night, and neither will be in dire straits with a loss. Still, with so many teams in the conference looking like legitimate postseason contenders, every win against one of those teams could put a shock in the NFC standings.
Creating Time to Bake – Baker Mayfield’s most electric play from the Buccaneers’ Week Six win over the 49ers was his 15-yard scramble to convert a third-and-14 near midfield. His escape from a backfield scrum, ability to elude several tacklers in the open field and lunge for the line to gain is already the stuff of legends. That said, for most of that game, Mayfield didn’t have to deal with that kind of pressure. The Buccaneers’ blockers only allowed him to be pressured on three of his 23 passes and he was sacked just one time. Mayfield was also only sacked once in the Week Five win at Seattle, and in those two games combined he has completed 82% of his passes for 635 yards, four touchdowns and no interceptions, topping 11 yards per attempt in both contests. That would be a nice formula to extend into Monday night, but it will be a serious challenge to keep Mayfield clean against a Lions defense that ranks fourth in the NFL with a sacks-per-pass-play rate of 10.11% and has averaged more than three sacks per game. Hutchinson leads the way with his 6.0 sacks (more on him below) but he’s gotten help from edge rusher Al-Quadin Muhammad (4.5 sacks) and off-ball linebackers Jack Campbell and Derrick Barnes (2.0 each). Given the injured state of their secondary, the Lions are likely to do whatever it takes to try to limit the amount of time Mayfield has to survey the field.
Disrupting the Balance – Even after losing Offensive Coordinator Ben Johnson to the Bears’ head coaching job and replacing him with John Morton, the Lions continue to emphasize balance on offense. Extreme balance: Through six games, Detroit has run the ball 175 times and thrown it 175 times. Since sacks are factored into the pass play total, the Lions have a slight lean to the pass on 51.3% of their snaps, but that’s still the fourth-lowest percentage of pass plays called in the NFL. On first down, the Lions run it 57.7% of the time, seventh most in the league, and they particularly like to run it when they get close to the end zone, with 123 red zone rushing yards, third most in the league. It’s a difficult backfield to contain because the duo of Gibbs and Montgomery provide both flash and power and the Lions can have a fresh back in their backfield at all times. That said, the Buccaneers have played strong run defense in 2025, most recently holding the 49ers’ Christian McCaffrey to 3.2 yards per carry on 17 attempts. Only one of their six opponents so far has topped 100 rushing yards as a team. When nose tackle Vita Vea is on the field, it is very hard to punch it up the gut against the Buccaneers. The 49ers, for instance, gained just 36 yards on 14 carries between the tackles when Vea was on the field last Sunday. Few teams are successful in bottling up the Gibbs-Montgomery duo, but the Buccaneers will try to do so on Monday night and may have the horses to get it done.