Buccaneers
The Buccaneers signed veteran DE Jason Pierre-Paul to their practice squad. Pierre-Paul said he is “damn near” in the best shape of his career despite not playing since 2023.
“I feel good,” Pierre-Paul said, via ProFootballTalk. “As far as the training, and I’ve been doing a lot of training with my personal trainer — he don’t stop, he trains every day. I’m like, ‘Yo, in football you get a break.’ He’s doing the best job of it and we kept it going and I think he got me in the best shape. I won’t say in my whole entire career, but damn near. I’ve seen the results, running around the lake and running sprinters and running drills, I was able to kill the bad drills out there. I think I killed it and I just think staying in shape was one of the main keys and just not giving up.”
The Falcons ranked No. 31 in the NFL on third downs this season, notably going 1-of-13 attempts in their recent loss to the Seahawks. Atlanta OC Zac Robinson called their third-down offense the “most disappointing part” of their season thus far.
“That’s the most disappointing part of our offense, is the third down,” Robinson said, viaTerrin Waack of the team’s site. “We started off the season kind of not playing that well in the red zone; we were playing well on third down. Then, obviously, it just has not gone well in terms of third down.”
Robinson said their protection and properly identifying coverages on third downs need to be better.
“Number of things that go into it,” Robinson said. “ First and foremost is always going to be the protection on third down. You got to make sure that you have sound protection. You got to make sure that we’re IDing things properly, we’re getting to the right people. I think we can be a lot cleaner in that area, just from an upfront standpoint. Then, a lot of it is just execution of the call based on the coverage. There’s a number of different coverages that you see, so you got to have sound answers. I think we’ve had opportunities to execute. There’s certainly times throughout the game where I say, ‘I mean, that wasn’t a great play call there.’ So, it’s always going to be a combination of everything. But there’s typically answers out there. You got to find them.”