When the offseason began the Tampa Bay Buccaneers needed to shed $55 million in salary and figure out how to build a contending team on a shoestring budget. As it turns out, all they needed to do was rent out the acres of real estate the team has inside of Cam Jordan’s head.
On Sunday the Bucs will travel to New Orleans for the first of two meetings with the Saints. It’s a game that most fans on the bayou probably skipped over when the schedule came out, but both teams head into the matchup with 2-1 records and control of the NFC South on the line.
Tampa Bay got off to a much hotter start to the season than the doubters predicted, with Baker Mayfield leading the team to back-to-back wins before running into the Eagles. Despite the loss, the Bucs didn’t look that bad on Monday night with a lot of the mistakes being self-inflicted rather than a product of being completely outclassed.
Make no mistake, the Bucs were the inferior team on Monday but they didn’t tumble backwards on the progress that was made over the first two weeks. The real test comes on Sunday against the Saints, a matchup that is already charged to begin with.
A win for the Bucs would send them into the bye week 3-1 and in first place. Not everyone seems to be as invested in the matchup as you’d think, though.
Cam Jordan takes lame shot at Bucs ahead of Week 4 showdown
Somebody might want to tell New Orleans Saints defensive lineman Cam Jordan that the writer’s strike is over and he should enlist some help with his trash talk.
While speaking with the media ahead of this Sunday’s matchup, Jordan was asked about the intensity of the Bucs-Saints rivalry which prompted one of the laziest attempts at trash talk we’ve seen in a while.
“Is there a rivalry with the Bucs I don’t know about,” Jordan said. ”Our only really rivalry is with and it’s not really a rivalry.”
Cam Jordan is usually good at this, which is why it’s such a bummer that he phoned in his swipe at the Bucs. Then again, nothing about the Saints has been good for a while, which seems to be having an impact on Jordan’s ability to come after the Bucs like he used to.
New Orleans boxed Tampa Bay’s ears in the regular season during the Tom Brady era in almost every game except the ones that mattered. The Saints suffered a loss on Monday night last year that contributed to their season being lost, which doubled as the Bucs officially tossing them off their back.
The loss that will forever stick out is the NFC Divisional Round game in which the Bucs retired Drew Brees on their way to winning the Super Bowl. It’s a game that set the Saints back in a big way and has seemingly broken Jordan.
Who can blame him, though? He played with a Hall of Fame quarterback and head coach during the peak of the Saints power and still never sniffed a Super Bowl appearance. Meanwhile, the team the Saints used as a punching bag during Jordan’s entire time in New Orleans roasted the Saints when it mattered most and won a ring that still eludes him.
It has to be frustrating to twist in the wind like that, something that has left Jordan so broken that he’s mailing in his trash talk ahead of the most pivotal game of the Saints season so far.