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It was announced on Wednesday that Tampa Bay Buccaneers cornerback Ryan Smith will be suspended for the first four games of the 2019 season after testing positive for PED’s.
Players getting suspended isn’t foreign land for Tampa Bay. In fact, it is becoming all too common for a team that over the last decade has had enough of it’s own problems.
Sorry, it's actually seven straight years in which Bucs have had a player suspended -- Dashon Goldson missed one game in 2013, Jorvorskie Lane missed two in 2014, then Alexander in 2015, Martin in 2016-17, Mike Evans in 2017, Winston in 2018, now Ryan Smith in 2019.
— Greg Auman (@gregauman) July 10, 2019
Now, many might say, well it’s Ryan Smith, it isn’t a huge suspension and won’t impact the team greatly. I disagree. Currently, you can make a valid argument that Smith is the team’s best special teams player and he will indeed be missed through the first four games of 2019. That isn’t the point of this article, though.
The overall point is that how hard is it for players to stop putting things into their bodies that they know can get them suspended? They make a lot of money each year, if they are really that lazy not to check the nutrition facts on a bottle of supplements, pay someone to do it for you, or simply bring it into the building and have the training staff check it for you.
Hopefully, with the new coaching staff coming into the building, the overall culture not only on the field, but off the field as well will change for this franchise. The team is already behind the eight ball to begin with in 2019, the last thing they need is players getting suspended who are set to play key roles on certain units.