The end of the 2025 season marked 4 whole years since the Tampa Bay Buccaneers had a player with double-digit sacks — dating all the way back to Shaq Barrett’s 10.0 sacks in 2021.
To put it lightly, it’s a weakness, and they may have let a good one go when they waived edge rusher Jose Ramirez at the end of training camp. It’s a move that might come back to haunt them one day.
“Former Bucs draft pick Jose Ramirez signed a futures contract with the Eagles today,” Fox Sports NFL reporter Greg Auman wrote on his official X account on Thursday, January 15. “Was out of the league this past season.”
Ramirez was a 2023 sixth round pick by the Buccaneers out of Eastern Michigan but only played in 4 regular season games over his first 2 seasons.
While the 6-foot-2, 252-pound Ramirez was out of the NFL in 2025, it’s important to point out he wasn’t out of pro football — he went and played in the Canadian Football League for the Hamilton Tiger-Cats.
Buccaneers Struggled With Roster Moves All Season
Because Ramirez was part of Tampa Bay’s final cuts before the 53-man roster was announced, one thing that sticks out about that initial roster, with hindsight being 20/20, was how poorly it was handled.
In a league where the inches matter (thanks, Al Pacino), the Buccaneers made the unusual decision to hold roster spots for NFL All-Pro offensive tackle and Tristan Wirfs and wide receiver Chris Godwin instead of putting them on injured reserve to start the season — what we can now look at as fairly catastrophic moves.
Godwin ended up missing 8 games as he recovered from a fractured fibula suffered midway through the 2024 season — an injury the Buccaneers should have known it would take a full year to heal.
Wirfs missed the first 3 games of the regular season after minor knee surgery and ended up missing a career high 5 games due to additional oblique and toe injuries. He would have benefited from a slow build-up to getting back on the field instead of shoe-horning him into the lineup for a Week 4 loss to the Philadelphia Eagles when he obviously wasn’t ready to play yet.
It’s hard to believe a player as dominant as Wirfs could not have been the difference between winning or losing the 2 late-season games he missed — games the Buccaneers lost by a combined 7 points to the New Orleans Saints in Week 14 and the Miami Dolphins in Week 17.
Ramirez Showed Plenty of Promise in Preseason
It’s actually kind of a mystery as to why Ramirez never got more of a shot to play in actual games. In the 4 regular-season games he played in, he was used more on special teams (40 snaps) than defense (30). In the 2 cases he was actually on the field when the Buccaneers blitzed, he ended up with one quarterback knockdown.
When Ramirez was given a chance to perform, usually in the preseason, he was incredibly effective, including putting up 3.0 sacks in a 2024 preseason game against the Jacksonville Jaguars.
Despite those types of numbers, Ramirez was buried on the depth chart behind a bunch of players who got plenty of chances but did little to nothing with them, including former first round pick Joe Tryon-Shoyinka, Chris Braswell and Anthony Nelson.
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