Through 43 seasons, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers have had 1,175 different players appear on one of their active rosters during the regular season. From that pool, 1,091 have played in at least one regular-season game and 657 have started at least one regular-season contest.

Fifty-three of those 1,175 players were on the active roster the evening the Buccaneers won their first Super Bowl title. Forty-one different players have represented the franchise in at least one Pro Bowl and 11 have been named an Associated Press First-Team All-Pro at least once while with the Buccaneers. Six of those 1,175 players to put on a Tampa Bay uniform are now in the Pro Football Hall of Fame; three of those six were Buccaneers for all or the majority of their careers.

Can we narrow this list to one? If you were asked to name the greatest Buccaneer of all time, would the answer be obvious? Derrick Brooks would certainly come quickly to mind, but surely others could argue pretty strongly for his fellow Hall of Famers, Lee Roy Selmon and Warren Sapp. John Lynch and Ronde Barber might find themselves in Canton before too long as well; would they make the discussion?

And what if you were trying to list the 10 greatest Buccaneers of all time? Now you have even more debate, particularly when you get down to the last few spots. And that's fine – the debate is really the whole point of asking the question. The difficulty arises in comparing players from different eras and at different positions. Offensive tackle Paul Gruber and tight end Jimmie Giles are both in the Buccaneers' Ring of Honor at Raymond James Stadium, but which one had the greater career.

(By the way, I am purposely making this a long introduction to the list in order to give you a chance to guess who's on the list and in what order before you see the results below. Scroll down if you just want to see the list without guessing.)

That seems like a largely subjective question, but the good folks at Pro Football Reference have attempted to provide an objective measure to compare players across eras and up and down the depth chart. Their method is called "Approximate Value," or AV, and like WAR in baseball it attempts to put a single numerical value to the contributions a player makes during an individual season. Also like WAR, it is a cumulative career stat, so if a player were to have 7AV in his first year and 10AV in his second year he would have 17AV after those two seasons. (That would be a very good start to a player's career, by the way; I lifted those numbers from Mike Evans' stat table.)

Another thing that AV has in common with WAR: It's complicated. If you'd like to read up on the AV methodology, visit the creator's explanatory pages here. But to summarize again: An AV score is meant to summarize a player's entire contributions in a season, it's cumulative throughout a career, and more is better.

Thus, if you are prepared to have faith in the AV methodology, then you can come up with at least a somewhat objective answer to that question about the 10 most valuable players in franchise history. This is certainly not the final answer to that question; keep in mind that the word "Approximate" is right there in the name of the statistic. Here's how AV's creator, Doug Drinen, puts it before diving deeper into the explanation of his methodology:

"AV is not meant to be a be-all end-all metric. Football stat lines just do not come close to capturing all the contributions of a player the way they do in baseball and basketball. If one player is a 16 and another is a 14, we can't be very confident that the 16AV player actually had a better season than the 14AV player. But I am pretty confident that the collection of all players with 16AV played better, as an entire group, than the collection of all players with 14AV."