Dirk Koetter pleased with the joint practices.

The Tampa Bay Bay Buccaneers wrapped up their second joint practice today with the Tennessee Titans. The team will now begin to prepare for their second preseason game which will take place on Saturday night at 8 p.m. EST.

It’s always a good measuring stick for teams at this stage of training camp to be able to practice against another football team besides themselves. It gives you a good idea on what are the real strengths and weaknesses of your football team. The Buccaneers have sort of made these joint practices an annual thing and by the sound of it, head coach Dirk Koetter was extremely pleased with the two practices, especially today’s.

”It was good. It was good work. There was the threat of rain, there was talk we might have to go inside,” Koetter said. “There was a lot of good situational work and I thought our guys competed well. That was a good practice, good work.”

It’s always a good test for a team when you have the opportunity to mock certain game situations. A good majority of NFL games come down to the last few minutes and that seemed to be in focus towards the end of practice as the “two-minute drills” were being worked on.

”Yeah, we had some two-minute situations, some down-on-the-clock situations. Everything was ‘need-a-field-goal’ except for the last couple ‘need-a-touchdown’ plays. Maybe right at the very end I thought practice kind of – those two two-minute drives went so long – I thought maybe the energy faded just a little bit right at the end,” Koetter said. “That was a long practice. Shoot, two hours and 40 minutes, that’s a little bit longer than we normally practice. So, good day all-in-all.”

Around this time last year, it felt as if Koetter was saying every practice was “sluggish” or that the guys just didn’t have enough intensity. It has been the complete opposite this year and Koetter has only said that one time out of all the training camp practices. The old saying “You play how you practice” seemed to come true for Tampa Bay last year. One can only hope that the team’s play in practice this year, which has been excellent, can carry over to the regular season.