Can Hargreaves be a shutdown corner?/CARMEN MANDATO
Friday, 3 a.m.
Bruce Arians likes it when the stars come out at night.
In fact, he likes it when the players aspiring to be stars come out, too.
The Bucs worked Thursday night as part of their training camp, and Arians saw things both good and bad in the Bucs' practice.
"I like the change of scenery, coming at night now," Arians said. "This is kind of how Carolina week will be. We’ll go three nights in a row to get ready for Carolina week.
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"This one was a little raggedy. (There was) some really, really good stuff and some poor stuff. I thought we dropped way too many passes. I thought our receivers were — they weren’t even out there other than Mike Evans. But, I loved the ebb and flow of it because the offense came back and won that drill at 19 seconds with no timeouts. We didn’t win the second one, so it was a good ebb and flow of offense versus defense and back and forth.”
After practice, Arians covered several topics.
On the quarterbacks not being able to get into a rhythm: "You can’t when everybody drops the ball. We dropped more passes — tight ends and receivers — today than we have all year.”
On kicker Matt Gay: “I’m not jinxing it. He’s doing good."
On Gay's range: "In here? Probably 70 (yards). Cairo (Santos) hit one outside with the wind 57 the other day, but that was a 30-mile-an-hour wind at his back. In here, it’s been around 50.”
On whether Vernon Hargreaves can be a shutdown corner: “I think we have four of them. Vernon is one of them, but Carlton (Davis III) had a great interception on the other side playing press-man and both those young guys (Jamel Dean and Sean Murphy-Bunting) are coming. And, M.J. (Stewart) is starting to pick it back up at corner. He’s not going to follow people — we’re going to play right and left. We’ve got enough guys that we don’t have to follow people around.”
On if it's harder to get a pre-snap read on the 3-4 defense: “Totally. You’d never know which four of those guys is coming. In a four-down line, you know who’s coming and it’s pretty easy.”
On if he is set on Blaine Gabbert being the team's backup quarterback: “There’s nothing written in stone, but he’s pretty solid.”
On limiting the interceptions by Jameis Winston: “He played extremely well in some ball games and then he would have an interception trying to fit a ball in that shouldn’t have been fit in. This is the thing we have to eliminate.”
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