Tampa Bay Buccaneers

Antoine Winfield Jr.: Practice Is Our Game

The Buccaneers and Jaguars held a "clean" and useful joint practice in Jacksonville on Wednesday, but safety Antoine Winfield Jr. would like to see the Bucs' start faster when the action resumes on Thursday.

Aug 14, 2024 at 02:10 PM

Scott Smith

Senior Writer/Editor

All-Pro safety Antoine Winfield Jr. did not play in the Tampa Bay Buccaneers' preseason opener in Cincinnati last weekend, and he likely won't suit up on Saturday against the Jacksonville Jaguars, either. Fortunately, he has a double-header scheduled in between.

Tampa Bay Head Coach sat almost all of his starters in Cincinnati in service of giving those fighting for jobs more rep and getting the team to the regular season as healthy as possible. Bowles hinted he may do the same against Jacksonville, particularly if he is pleased with the work that his starters got in a pair of joint practices at the Jaguars' facility this week.

As such, if players like Winfield and Mike Evans and Baker Mayfield wanted to scratch their competitive itch in the middle of August, they needed to treat the two joint practices as if it was full-bore competition with another team.

"This is a game for us because we might not be playing in all the preseason games," said Winfield. "But this is a game for us, game speed, game mentality, so we've got to come out here and actually execute what we're doing."

Inconveniently, practices don't have scoreboards or replay boards, so it's not always easy to tell if one side or another is gaining the upper hand. That said, both Winfield and Bowles indicated after Wednesday's session that the team could have done a better job of getting in gear early on. That's an issue Winfield hopes the Bucs will correct in the second half of the doubleheader on Thursday morning.

"I felt like we started a little flat," he said. "As practice went on, we got better, so I'm looking forward to tomorrow. Now we know what we've got to do.

"[We need] the physicality and the mentality that we had towards the end of practice. I feel like as practice went on we kind of juiced it up, so make sure we come out tomorrow with that burst instead of waiting until the third or fourth period to get into that mentality."

Still, by the end of the two-hour workout, Winfield felt as if the Bucs had definitely put in some valuable work that they couldn't have gotten in another practice by themselves at the AdventHealth Training Center in Tampa. In most of the full-team drills, the Buccaneers' first-team offense went against the Jaguars' first-team defense on one field while the opposite took place on the other field.

"Solid, solid day," said Winfield. "It's great work for us to go and see different opponents, different guys and different faces. It's always fun when we're going against another team, just the energy and the juice of it. It's fun."

Notably, the practice was mostly devoid of the type of scuffles that are often common when two teams share a field and the intensity of the competition heats up. In fact, Winfield said Wednesday's workout was probably the "cleanest" join practice in which he'd ever taken part.

"A hundred percent you want to take care of everybody," he said. "Everybody wants to make it to the season at a hundred percent. We're out here working against each other but we also want to make sure we're not killing each other."

Typically, when two teams practice together on back-to-back days, the second practice is chippier than the first as players remember slights from the previous day. Winfield and the Buccaneers will hope for another clean session on Thursday, and one in which their energy level is high from the very first start.

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TAMPA, FL - August 13, 2024 - Wide Receiver Sterling Shepard #25 of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers departs for joint practices in Jacksonville prior to the Preseason game against the Jacksonville Jaguars. Photo By Doug DeFelice/Tampa Bay Buccaneers