Here are five players to watch in Friday night’s game between the Buccaneers and the Bengals.
Buccaneers football is back! Would anyone like to join me in a hallelujah to celebrate that fact? Finally the players get to come off of the practice field and onto the stadium field in front of screaming fans. It may not count in the standings but it’s still real football. It beats watching the CFL which, I confess, I start to do while waiting for the NFL to come back. Would that make me a football junkie or a football nerd? Find me on social media to answer that one.
Friday night, the Bucs head out to Cincinnati, Ohio to take on the Marvin Lewis-led Bengals. Some believe that Lewis may be on the hot seat with his team underachieving for quite some time now. We won’t see much of them, but Andy Dalton and A.J. Green are back for another season, and even for one series, they will likely test the Bucs secondary. When you have players like Geno Atkins on the other side of the football, your team will always be tough. The plays will be limited as always in the preseason, but these are still two interesting teams to watch.
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These games are always difficult to interpret. As nobody has taken the field for a game until now, handicapping the potential storylines is difficult. There are a lot of players that we simply haven’t met before. We may know the draft class, but there are always names that we aren’t aware of that make a name for themselves, and do it quickly in game number one.
We can make some reasonable guesses, however. For the Bucs, here are five players to watch on Friday night. Some are established players, but some may not be. Some may be making their initial mark on the league, maybe some are trying to return to form? Sorry, that’s the closest you get to a spoiler. You will just have to read on.