Baker Mayfield is getting a lot of run this week for basically scolding his beloved teammates about not being focused on details and not having a killer instinct is leading to losing games and maybe, screwing up what could be a magical season.
Bucs coach Todd Bowles has been pretty vocal about his support for Mayfield setting his teammates straight.
The way Joe looks at it, Mayfield is such a team-first guy who is always willing to prop up his teammates; for him to be openly critical like this, it must be an issue or issues much bigger than the team is admitting.
Well, there’s another coach who has Mayfield’s back in this (in addition to Bowles). That would be Bucs offensive coordinator Josh Grizzard.
Yesterday in his weekly presser, Grizzard was asked to comment on Mayfield’s comments. Grizzard said Mayfield is right on.
“I agree with it,” Grizzard said. “I echoed everything he said on Monday as well, because when you have a practice week and you’re having a play and it might not have been executed the way you wanted to execute it, there’s not a lot of time to run a lot of these plays multiple times because you move on to third down or the red area.
“Guys have to be able to correct it at that point and know when we get in the game, you have to execute it at a high level, and you might not get another rep at that, especially full speed to do it.
“When he talks about the killer instinct, I’d echo that as well. We’re coming off a bye week, guys got time off, we talk about starting fast, we go down there and get seven points – and then you go down there on the second drive and it sputters out. That’s, I think, where the killer instinct needs to come in – that seven [points] is not enough, especially some of these high-powered offenses.”
Grizzard said Bucs players have to realize they cannot take their foot off the gas at any point until the offense goes into Victory Formation.
“It’s got to be for 60 minutes, and if it takes more than that, it takes more than that,” Grizzard said. “You can’t let off just because you got seven [points] on the first drive.”
It almost sounds to Joe like dudes thought they had the game in the bag when they scored on the opening drive.
What Joe would like to know is, how do guys think they have it all figured out if they’re dialing back the energy?
And this leadership stuff, it’s rearview mirror logic. Hey, it’s great that guys like Lavonte David or Mayfield will unload on guys. But this is coming after the damage is done. If guys were loafing in the first quarter, where were these self-anointed leaders to address the issue right away? Why wait until after a loss?