Go ahead. Pooh-pooh if you must.
After the recent seasons of watching the Tampa Bay Bucs, no one can blame you.
So go ahead. Talk about how it was just a preseason game. Talk about practice football. Mention that it doesn’t count, and that no one will remember it in a month. Talk about fake football.
On the other hand, the Bucs won a 25-11 game over the Cincinnati Bengals, and along the way, they resembled a real football team for a change. Hey, it beats the alternative.
“People want to look at this as a preseason game,” quarterback Jameis Winston said. “But in that locker room, we’re going to look at this as us getting a win. Winning does matter. It doesn’t matter if it’s a football game in the Wal-Mart parking lot, we want to win. So that’s obviously important.”
For the Bucs, it was the first home win ever for Bucs’ coach Lovie Smith, who had lost his first 10 games here. In all, the home crowds haven’t seen a lot of winning. Since Jon Gruden, who spent his Monday night in the TV booth, left the sideline, the Bucs were only 16-45 at home coming into this one.
So this must have looked good to the home fans. The young quarterback started fast. The running game was good. The pass rush sizzled. The secondary played well. Backup quarterback Mike Glennon played well. Pretty much, every item on Smith’s checklist worked out okay.
Consider the defense. The Bengals, a playoff team, played their starters pretty much for a half. Quarterback Andy Dalton had a rating of 15.7, threw two picks and was sacked twice. The Cincinnati running game averaged only 2.5 yards per carry.
In other words, it wasn’t just that the Bucs won. It was that they played in a manner that hinted it might happen again.
Of course, around Tampa Bay, the conversation always seems to start with Winston. This time, as opposed to his first game, he started off fast, hitting his first three passes and running in from the one for a score.
“Most of it,” Smith said of Winston’s quality play. “Jameis would probably tell you he would like to have that deep ball back probably. Besides that I thought he was accurate throughout. Even on some of the incompletions, the ball was right there. He was in control from the start. He played winning football tonight.”
Winston tweaked an ankle on the last series he played, but Smith said it was a coach’s decision, not an injury, that ended his night. If the Bucs had needed him, he would have played the next series.
“My main goal is to get better,” Winston said. “My first two passes were check downs. I don’t believe I had many check downs in the first game. The main goal for this team is to get better every week, build on the positives and eliminate the negatives. We started off fast. That was a good thing. We got on a roll early and we kept it.”
The Bucs play Cleveland here Saturday night in their third preseason game.
