Bucs look for cure to primetime problems
With apologies to the Bee Gees, it's not as though the Tampa Bay Buccaneers have night fever, night feevaaaaa.
They do know how to do it. But do they know how to show it?
Head coach Bruce Arians' Buccaneers did win their lone night game in 2019, his first year at the helm in Tampa: 20-14 at Carolina.
This season they're 1-for-3. The sole victory, on Monday night three weeks ago at the New York Giants, was by the skin of the Bucs' teeth, 25-23.
They lost in Week 5 at Chicago, 20-19, in a game they had under control early and — in one of the most perplexing results of the 2020 NFL season — three Sundays ago at home the Bucs got blown out by New Orleans, as wholly as the 38-3 score suggests.
Tampa Bay (7-3) plays host to the Los Angeles Rams (6-3) on Monday in the Bucs' final scheduled prime-time game of the regular season.
Both teams are in the thick of their respective division races in the NFC, with December just around the corner.
The Bucs were so distraught, and shocked, by their across-the-board awful showing against the Saints two weeks ago that Arians decided a change of practice routine might help. That is, if the game's at night, why not practise this past week at night, too? So that's what they did on Friday and Saturday.
This will be the Rams' fifth and final road game played in the eastern time zone in their first 10 games, and second in Florida. They crushed the Eagles in Philadelphia 37-19, lost at Buffalo 35-32, blew out the Washington Football Team 30-10 and got roughed up by the Dolphins in Miami 28-17. So 2-2.
The game is a rematch of the quarterback combatants of Super Bowl LIII, in which stout defences prevented both Jared Goff of the Rams and Tom Brady — then of the New England Patriots — from completing more than a small handful of impact passes.
Few defenders and defensive-side coaches remain from that 2018 Los Angeles team. One is tackle Aaron Donald, who has a ton of respect for Brady.
“He knows the game,” Donald said. “He knows how to take control of the game. So you've got to be smart when you're playing against a quarterback like that.”