Things People Said

Lots of defensive personnel got face time yesterday to talk about what their various problems, how they’re dealing with them and what they’re doing to solve them. I’ll warn you now, it’s not a happy story. First up, Gaines Adams:

“We’re 0-2, so it’s not just me that has to work harder,” he said. “The guys that are in the spotlight need to make more plays. The guys that are depended on, such as myself, they all need to make more plays.”

Ugh, this is depressing. This is probably like something that happened to him in elementary school. “Mr. Adams, were you talking in class?” “Yeah, but so was everyone else!” Except he’s doing it as an adult. If, two games in, he is trying to deflect responsibility to his teammates when Raheem Morris called him out by name, it’s a bad sign for the rest of this season. This may not end well.

Jim Bates:

“It’s awfully hard during preseason to tell where a team is at,” Bates said. ”You’ve got to get into the season, and we have to make adjustments. It isn’t like we have Deion Sanders out there that I was part of for years or that we have (former Dolphins cornerbacks) Sam Madison and Pat Surtain. I mean, we have to adjust a little bit to what I’m accustomed to doing in a lot of situations.”

Please leave your opinions on this in the comments. Is Bates really saying that he is having to change his scheme because his cornerbacks aren’t as talented as he’s used to? That’s just wrong on so many levels. What are Ronde Barber and Aqib Talib supposed to think about themselves now? How are they going to have faith in Bates when Bates has no faith in them? Deion Sanders was one of the most physically gifted athletes to ever play football… any position, any time. What purpose does it serve to compare your guys to a standard that they can’t possibly achieve? Imagine telling your wife that you have to adjust your boner because she’s not Angelina Jolie. Would she take it well? Would she be more inclined to try and please you?

And I’m not even done with Bates yet.

“I have to be able to adjust. … We put the plan together. It isn’t a Jim Bates game plan. It’s all bringing it in together and working as a defensive staff.”

Maybe I’m looking at this too negatively after the first quote, but it sure sounds to me like Bates is relinquishing ownership of the defense now. Bates has been the coordinator since February. If he didn’t think he had the players for his scheme, he had plenty of time to change them. Maybe Morris didn’t let him. Maybe that’s why Derrick Brooks and Cato June are gone. Bates couldn’t use them and that’s as many starters as Morris thought the fans and ownership would accept losing, so now Bates is stuck with players whose weaknesses he has to work around. This is all just thinking out loud here, but what else could he mean?

Now Raheem talks about it:

“We can always mix and match our coverage,” Morris said. “Like I (said) when I hired Jim, he was always pounding me down trying to figure out about the Tampa 2, and I was always trying to hound him down trying to figure out about quarters (coverage). Now we’re just trying to find a happy medium where our players can get comfortable and go out there and play as fast as they possibly can.”

There are any number of possibilities for mixing defenses; teams do it all the time. But they’re usually primarily one kind of defense that they can adjust out of from time to time as the situation requires. It sounds like Tampa Bay doesn’t have a defensive scheme right now. They have a hodgepodge of shit that they’re trying to mold into something cohesive using players that they don’t sound very confident in. Thus the #31 defensive ranking in both yards and points.

Morris tried to address the doubts.

“It would be if you were a mentally weak team,” Morris said when asked if players would start to naturally question the defense at this point. “This is not a mentally weak team, neighborhood, staff or locker room. I’m sure you guys remember that in 1996 Tony Dungy walked in here and had a defense with Derrick Brooks, Warren Sapp and John Lynch. They said Lynch couldn’t play safety and should be moved to linebacker.”

Move a safety to linebacker? No, that would be crazy.

“They said Brooks was too small to play linebacker, and they said Sapp was too fat and had too many off-the-field issues. Thirteen years later we can’t believe we got rid of them and that they’re no longer with the Bucs.”

You can’t believe you got rid of Brooks, huh? Were you being controlled by hypnosis when you cut him in February? Are you aware that he is still unsigned and that if you thought he could help, he could be made part of the team again very easily? What a fucking dumb thing to say. “I can’t believe we got rid of Brooks.”

But I think his point is that even the evolution of the Tampa 2 was slow even with the quality of players they had on board back then, so expect this to go slowly as well. It’s his way of gently lowering public expectations, which is a smart move at this stage. Between this and the local media predicting a winless season, I think we’ll all be happy if the team successfully finds their way to the stadium each week.