Defense rallied together.
“This Joe” swears to only seeing two interviews of Vita Vea where he actually had interesting things to say.
Joe is not anti-Vea. Not at all. But almost all the time, Vea treats interviews as either a joke or a total waste of his time. So much so Joe rarely talks to Vea.
The first time Joe saw a postgame interview where Vea was sincere was after he scored a touchdown in Atlanta in 2019.
The other was tonight.
Sitting at the Amazon _Thursday Night Football_ set in Jerry’s World, Vea told his old Bucs teammate Richard Sherman that the Bucs defense got together this week and all grievances were aired.
Alex Anzalone said on Amazon after the game that KitKat-eating Bucs coach [Todd Bowles was key](https://www.joebucsfan.com/2026/10/alex-anzalone-credits-todd-bowles-leadership-for-w/) in getting the Bucs’ minds right to forget about the loss to the Packers and quickly focus on the Cowboys.
Anzalone didn’t elaborate but Sherman heard that and wanted to know from Vea what Bowles said.
> **Richard Sherman:** What did he say that — Todd ain’t gonna say a lot during these meetings. He ain’t gonna get all rah-rah. He’s not going to get high, he’s not going to get low. What was different about this week?
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> **Vita Vea:** I think it was more so us players. I think we got together as a unit and talked amongst ourselves. It was one of those come-to-Jesus moments. ‘We’re not really 0-4. We’re not playing like we are 0-4.’ We were shutting it down on defense. Offense was doing their thing. We were just not finishing at the end of the game. It was one of those things we harped on throughout the whole week. I know we had a short week. It was one of those things that we got together as a whole unit. We knew we had to figure it out.
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> The defense sure did. They got a chokehold on maybe the best offense in the NFL and even though Dallas finally got that offense into gear late, it wasn’t enough because the defense made just enough plays to put the game away.
Jerry Jones was so peeved, he slammed the desk he was sitting at in his palace up in his suite.
Joe could watch a clip of that over and over and over again, all night long. On a loop for hours.