Lovie Smith says his ballclub is getting better.
The Bucs are 1-2, and they were beaten by Houston on Sunday, but Smith swears he can see an upturn in his team’s performance.
“Our ball club is getting better,” Smith said Monday. “I know the record isn’t showing that right now, but that is going to change. Talking about yesterday though, offensively, the offensive line played well and it was a good front we were playing against. The offensive line played well. [They] gave us an opportunity to do some things, especially throw the football.”
Still the Bucs missed too many kicks, and dropped too many passes, and let too many third-down opportunities slip past. They missed too many tackles, and they gave up too many yards on the ground, and they didn’t score enough
“We had too many dropped balls, simple as that,” Smith said. “Jameis [Winston] would like to have a couple of throws back. I thought he did a pretty good job, as a rookie quarterback growing and growing. Defensively, I talked about not being able to stop the run yesterday. That’s the same after we watched the video a few different times. Special teams, we realize we didn’t get it done, especially with the field goals. Kyle [Brindza] is a good kicker. He’s a good kicker that had an off day yesterday.
“We didn’t play our best ball – fundamentals, not being able to make the play. Whenever something doesn’t go the way you want it to go it’s about the fundamentals, some of the basic things you need to do to have success in a play. Yes, that was the case.”
Smith suggested the Bucs’ defense is struggling to find its identity. Against the Texans, it had eight tackles for loss but still didn’t play well.
“This is the third game of the season,” Smith said. “I think you look in the league, you have to give the offenses a little bit of credit and to think that I invented defensive football and the offense can’t move the ball – there were periods of time yesterday when we played pretty good football. We didn’t finish the way we would like, but it’s a 19-9 game. It wasn’t a 42-14 game yesterday. We didn’t play the run as well as we needed to at times. We got a couple of guys out of their gap, but we’re not getting ready to junk anything. Let’s just play, let everything play out a little bit. We’ll be fine on the defensive side of the ball. I saw some things yesterday that I haven’t seen. We worked some different combinations. I liked what we were able to get from our cornerback positions.”
Besides defense, the Bucs’ inability on third down was crushing. The team converted only one of 12 chances.
“You are throwing and catching, simple as that,” Smith said. “You have some drops. I would say a lot of it would have to do with that, probably most of it. I don’t know exactly, I’ll say as you look at it, it was probably that, when we had opportunities to make those plays. That’s why I’m excited about where we are. We’re not going to always drop the ball. When we have good protection, our quarterback is a good football player and he can get the ball there. In time, that connection, when our guys all get on the same page with that, that won’t happen. A lot of those third downs really came down to that.”
The Bucs looked to receiver Mike Evans 17 times in the game. Too much, Smith said.
“That is a lot to focus on one guy, yes,” Smith said. “We need to distribute. Dirk [Koetter] will be the first guy to say that ‘we’ will be saying that we need to distribute the ball around to more of our guys. Sometimes it just happens like that when you feel like you have a favorable matchup. You’re not just worried about how it’s going to look later on. In this moment, it’s a good matchup and we had that throughout. Mike had over 100 yards catching yesterday, right? Add some of the drops in there, it was one of those days. I think as you look around the league, sometimes you can just highlight really one receiver on certain days. We can spread the ball around to some more of our receivers, yes.
“I can’t say (Winston) forced it. If you were a quarterback, you would like to throw the ball to Mike Evans too. You would probably be looking for him quite a bit, too. I can’t say force. We have more than just Mike. We will need to not force, but throw it to some of our other receivers also.”
