A Tampa fan settled into his seat at Raymond James Stadium on Sunday wearing a red Buc-ee's shirt, cartoon beaver and all.
The internet decided that was close enough for team spirit, but the Browns were about to make it look like the smartest call in the building.
Because somewhere in Las Vegas, a handful of people were making a much more expensive Bucs mistake.
Close Enough Got a Whole Lot of Laughs
The photo is pure game-day gold.
There's our guy in the stands, surrounded by a sea of red Buccaneers jerseys with the scoreboard glowing behind him, proudly repping a Texas gas station known for brisket sandwiches and spotless bathrooms.
The poster joked that the "Buc" in the name made it close enough, and the post took off with tens of thousands of likes.
The replies went straight where you'd expect, with fans cracking jokes about the Buc-ee's legal department coming after him.
Honestly, that's not much of a joke.
The Beaver Has Lawyers and Uses Them
Buc-ee's protects that buck-toothed beaver like Lawrence Taylor protected the edge.
A lip-licking alligator, a smiling moose and a hat-wearing bear have all ended up in the chain's legal crosshairs.
This summer, Buc-ee's went after a tiny Ohio shop called Beaver's Mini Mart, claiming its logo looked too much like the famous beaver.
The fight got so ugly that John Oliver started selling knockoff "Buc-off" merchandise, and the mini mart's supporters raised at least $69,000 on GoFundMe to keep the doors open.
So if our guy in the red shirt ends up on the jumbotron, he might want to keep an eye out for a process server in the parking lot.
And somebody should warn Bucs running back Bucky Irving, who ran 17 times for 89 yards on Sunday while sharing a nickname with the Buc-ee's beaver itself.
The Browns Were Supposed to Be the Free Square
Nobody in Tampa saw this coming.
Survivor experts spent the week treating Cleveland as the league's free space after the Browns got embarrassed by Jacksonville in Week 1.
The Bucs were better than a touchdown favorite at home.
Then Deshaun Watson went 24 of 30 for 238 yards with no turnovers, turning in his best game since September 2023.
Mother Nature piled on with a 132-minute lightning delay, and when play resumed in a downpour, two near-misses in the end zone sent Tampa to its first 0-2 start in 12 years.
The Cleveland defense slammed the door by forcing an incompletion on fourth-and-10 on the final drive.
Fourteen Guys Just Lit $1.4 Million on Fire
This is where it gets painful.
In the Circa Grandissimo, the high-roller survivor contest in Vegas that costs $100,000 per entry, 14 of the 49 entries still standing picked the Bucs.
That's $1.4 million up in smoke two weeks into the season.
The regular Circa Survivor contest took a beating too, with more than 6,000 entries riding Tampa as the second-most popular pick of the week.
After two weeks, just 8,610 of the original 25,017 entries are left standing.
Circa Sports operations director Jeff Benson summed it up the way any guy at the end of the bar would: "Week 2 said: 'Hold my beer.'"
Last Week the Chargers Did the Same Thing
This is a pattern, not a fluke.
In Week 1, it was the Chargers losing to Arizona that nuked survivor pools, knocking out 32.5 percent of Yahoo's entries.
Then the Chargers got upset again in Week 2, and 1,357 more Circa entries went down with them because some people never learn.
It's the same story that played out in Week 3 of 2023, when nearly two-thirds of survivor players were gone after huge chunks of the field took the Cowboys and Jaguars and both lost as big favorites.
Survivor pools don't reward the obvious pick.
They punish it.
Meanwhile, the guy in the Buc-ee's shirt spent Sunday soaking in the rain, eating stadium nachos and losing zero dollars.
So who really had the worst day in Tampa – the fan who wore a gas station shirt to an NFL game, or the 14 high rollers who trusted Baker Mayfield with $100,000 apiece?
Send this to your buddy who burned his survivor pool on the Bucs and is now picking the Hot Dog Eating Contest just to stay sane.
Sources:
- Tampa Bay Buccaneers, "Buccaneers Fall to Cleveland Browns 23-19 in Week 2," Buccaneers.com, September 20, 2026.
- Associated Press, "Browns 23-19 Buccaneers Game Recap," ESPN, September 20, 2026.
- Las Vegas Review-Journal, "Circa Survivor contest carnage: NFL Week 2 upsets KO $10.3M in entries," Las Vegas Review-Journal, September 22, 2026.
- VegasInsider, "2026 Circa Survivor Pool – Record Pot Reaches $25 Million," VegasInsider, September 2026.
- Yahoo Sports, "Buccaneers' upset loss to Browns took another huge chunk out of survivor pools," Yahoo Sports, September 21, 2026.
- Yahoo Sports, "NFL Survivor Pool Picks Based on Implied Probability," Yahoo Sports, September 2026.
- 4for4, "Splash Sports Survivor Picks Week 2," 4for4, September 2026.
- CBS Sports, "Best NFL football knockout, survivor pool picks, strategy, advice for Week 4, 2023," CBS Sports, September 2023.
- Julie Carr Smyth, "Buc-ee's chain draws outcry in Ohio for launching fight over mini mart's beaver logo," Associated Press, August 23, 2026.
