All-Pro safety Antoine Winfield Jr. did not play in the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ season opener at Cincinnati last weekend and likely won’t play Saturday against the Jacksonville Jaguars either. Fortunately, he has a doubleheader scheduled in between.
The Tampa Bay head coach left almost all of his starters on the bench in Cincinnati to give more credit to players fighting for their jobs and to get the team as healthy as possible heading into the regular season. Bowles hinted that he may do the same against Jacksonville, especially if he is satisfied with the performance of his starters in two joint practices at the Jaguars’ facility this week.
If players like Winfield, Mike Evans and Baker Mayfield wanted to satisfy their competitive urges in mid-August, they had to treat the two joint practices as if they were a real competition against another team.
“This is a game for us because we may not play all of our preseason games,” Winfield said. “But this is a game for us, game pace, game mentality, so we have to come out here and execute what we’re doing.”
Unfortunately, there are no scoreboards or replay boards at practice, so it’s not always easy to tell if one side or the other is gaining the upper hand. However, both Winfield and Bowles suggested after Wednesday’s session that the team could have been more on the up-and-up earlier. Winfield hopes the Bucs can fix that problem in the second half of Thursday morning’s doubleheader.
“I felt like we started a little slow,” he said. “As practice went on, we got better, so I’m looking forward to tomorrow. Now we know what we have to do.”
“(We need) the physicality and the mentality that we had towards the end of practice. I feel like we’ve been pushing harder as practice has gone on. So we definitely need to come out tomorrow with that burst of energy instead of waiting until the third or fourth period to develop that mentality.”
Still, at the end of the two-hour practice, Winfield felt the Bucs definitely did some valuable work that they wouldn’t have been able to do at another practice at Tampa’s AdventHealth Training Center. Most of the full-team drills pitted the Buccaneers’ first team offense against the Jaguars’ first team defense on one field, while the opposite was true on the other field.
“Solid, solid day,” Winfield said. “It’s a great job for us, seeing different opponents, different guys, different faces. It’s always fun when we go up against a different team, just the energy and the excitement. It’s fun.”
Remarkably, the practice was largely free of any of the scuffles that often occur when two teams share a field and the intensity of the competition increases. In fact, Winfield said Wednesday’s practice was probably the “cleanest” joint practice he has ever been a part of.
“You want to take care of everyone 100 percent,” he said. “Everyone wants to get through the season 100 percent. We’re working against each other here, but we also want to make sure we don’t kill each other.”
When two teams practice together on consecutive days, the second practice is usually more lively than the first as players remember the previous day’s offense. Winfield and the Buccaneers hope for another clean session on Thursday, playing with high energy from the start.
