Improve tackling, please.
Here’s a good bar bet for you to use tonight.
Go to anyone at your favorite watering hole and ask them how many missed tackles Jamel Dean had last year. Most Bucs fans will scoff and likely claim he had at least a half-dozen.
True, Dean was never known to be Ronnie Lott. He wasn’t a physical player. But here is the answer which may surprise you:
Per Pro-Football-Reference.com, Jamel Dean had a grand total of one missed tackle all of 2025. Uno. Ein. Enas. So much for Dean being a terrible tackler.
The reason Joe brings all this up is that last year, rookie backup corner Benjamin Morrison had six missed tackles. Dean played 660 snaps last year. Morrison had 359.
Joe doesn’t bring this up to hammer Morrison but Joe does bring it up to hammer the Bucs for not stressing fundamentals.
A lot of football people blame the erosion of fundamental tackling across the league on the lack of padded practices where teams are allowed to hit.
Sounds good until you think it through. Joe always believed that was a cop out. You can help teach fundamental tackling by using a tackling dummy.
So, let’s think this through, that fewer padded practices means more half-arsed tackling: When is the last time you saw Baltimore with awful tackling? Long time, right? In fact, all the teams the Harbaugh Bros. coached, they always had good tackling teams.
Same with Mike Tomlin. When is the last time you saw a Steelers team not tackle well?
Did Mike Macdonald in Seattle have a rotten-tackling team?
Did Jesse Minter look like he had a bad tackling team in Los Angeles when he was the Chargers defensive coordinator? Or Jim Schwartz in Cleveland? Or Vic Fangio in Philadelphia?
Yet all those teams work out, train and practice under the very same rules as ever other team in the NFL. Unless you are suggesting all of those teams are cheating with illegal practices, the theory that bad tackling has contaminated much of the NFL due to a lack of padded practices simply doesn’t hold water.
(FYI, all NFL teams’ practices are live-streamed and recorded by the NFL in the league headquarters in New York as the NFL, like Big Brother, monitors teams’ practices to ensure no hanky-panky is going on. Some teams can and are fined for hitting in what are supposed to be underwear football practices.)
Morrison was hardly the only Bucs player who struggled with tackling. Let’s not tee off on him. The problem isn’t Morrison; the problem is proper tackling either isn’t being taught or isn’t being stressed enough by the Bucs.
Joe is pretty confident this Bucs team will only go as far as the defense allows it. And Joe isn’t too familiar with many good defenses that have sloppy tackling.
Tackling needs to be Objective-1A for this Bucs defense to solve before Week 1.