Happy Friday to everyone as I come to you live from Day 1 of the 32^nd training camp in Tampa Bay Buccaneers history, the sixth here at Disney’s Wide World of Sports, just off exit 65 on I-4. This is the first in what will be a series of blog journal entries from training camp over the next few weeks, and right out of the gate, as you probably already know by now, there was news to liven things up a bit with yesterday evening’s release of DE Simeon Rice.

 

I will get deeper into this on The Sports Desk later on this afternoon, but let it suffice to say for now that there are three schools of thought on the matter:

 

1)      His injured shoulder was going to prevent him from ever being the same player, and the Bucs made the right move by releasing him now.

2)      The Bucs needed to release him but used very poor timing and should’ve done it during the offseason.

3)      They shouldn’t have released him at all and their timing shines an even more negative light on the whole thing.

 

Again, we’ll get into that more on this afternoon’s show.

 

As for the actual morning practice, it was just shorts and helmets, and how much can you say about one football practice? General cloud cover did spare everybody exposure to the usual 95 degree temperatures, and it stayed closer to a breezy 88. I don’t subscribe to all of the camp clichés such as, “So and so really looks good” or what have you. What does that even mean, to say a guy “looks good”? Guys do tend to look good during non contact drills at three quarters speed. I can tell you that there was a bit of a weird vibe early on in the practice as the Rice news was still sinking in (Ronde Barber acknowledged as much after the session), but after a while, things seemed to settle back to being pretty normal. They’ll get back out there this afternoon to complete the two-a-day.

 

In other news, there was little movement regarding the single stupidest storyline of this or probably any other camp in the league – the Bucs’ ridiculous insistence on caring where Jake Plummer is or what he’s doing at any given moment. He’s not here, and Bruce Allen stated that he could be fined for not being around since he is technically under contract. Whatever, Bruce.

 

I’ll be checking in again periodically unless, of course, anything of note happens, in which case I’ll get to a computer as fast as possible. In the meantime, catch The Sports Desk with Bobby Fenton later this afternoon from 6-7 pm on 1010 Sports The Beast.