ASHBURN, Va. >> Todd Bowles as a defensive coach does not want to see the wild-card playoff game between his Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Washington Commanders turn into a high-scoring shootout. His quarterback wouldn’t mind.

“If you come out on the right side of it, yeah,” Baker Mayfield said.

The points could come fast and furious when Mayfield and the Buccaneers host standout rookie QB Jayden Daniels and the Commanders on Sunday night in a matchup of two of the NFL’s top-five scoring offenses. Tampa Bay won six of seven down the stretch to finish atop the NFC South, Washington won five in a row to get the conference’s sixth seed at 12-5 and these teams are facing off again a little more than four months since meeting to open the regular season.

The Bucs won that game 37-20. They’re 3-point favorites now, according to BetMGM Sportsbook, and competitors on either side acknowledge much has changed since Week 1.

“It’s a full-circle moment,” Commanders coach Dan Quinn said. “You don’t usually get to play somebody at the start of a season, then the start of a second season. They absolutely got the best of us on that day, and so it’s a good measuring stick to see how much we’ve improved. They’re an excellent team and clearly on that day showed it.”

Tampa Bay (10-7) is in the playoffs for a fifth consecutive year, a streak that started with Tom Brady beginning his march to his seventh Super Bowl title by winning at Washington. Nearly everything has changed with these organizations since that Jan. 9, 2021, game, including that the home team was a full year away from being renamed the Commanders.

Mayfield is in his second season running the Buccaneers’ offense, which averaged nearly 32 points a game during the 6-1 run since the bye week to take the team from 4-6 to division champions again. Most of the celebration last week centered on Mike Evans reaching 1,000 yards for an 11th consecutive season to tie Jerry Rice’s record and trigger a $3 million contract bonus, not clinching a playoff spot.

“(We are) happy we won the division obviously, but that’s not like, ‘OK, we won the division,’” rookie center Graham Barton said. “Now it doesn’t matter. It’s, ‘Now we’re in the playoffs,’ and so we have to win each and every week.”

If the Bucs win, they would play at Philadelphia if the Eagles beat Green Bay or host the Los Angeles Rams or Minnesota if the Packers win.

The Commanders could go to Detroit, LA or Minnesota if they get past Tampa Bay, but with Daniels set for his NFL playoff debut at the site of his first professional game, the focus is one game at a time after he and Quinn helped Washington turn things around from going 4-13 last season.

“A lot of people are going to put a lot of emphasis on it because at this point it’s really win or go home,” Daniels said. “At the end of the day, you got to go out there and play ball.”

Running it up >> The Buccaneers can throw the ball just about as good as anyone. They also can gash opponents on the ground with running backs Bucky Irving, Rachaad White, Sean Tucker and even Mayfield, who believes balance on offense is his team’s biggest improvement since losing to the Lions in the divisional round a year ago.

Washington has the worst run defense among playoff teams and ranked 30th out of 32 in the regular season. Asked this week what had gone wrong and needed to improve, defensive end Dorance Armstrong paused for a full 10 seconds before clamming up.

On the other side of the ball, the Bucs have the fourth-best run defense in the league. Daniels ran for the most yards by a rookie QB with 891 and was the Commanders’ leading rusher.