The biggest story in Sunday’s game between the Buccaneers and Saints was the Buccaneers running off 27 straight points in the second half to go from trailing 27-24 to winning 51-24.
Head coach Dennis Allen called the defensive performance unacceptable in his postgame press conference and it was tough to focus on much other than the 594 yards that the Bucs piled up on their way to the win. The game also featured the first NFL start by quarterback Spencer Rattler, however, and Allen also spent some time talking about the rookie’s performance.
Rattler was 22-of-40 for 243 yards, a touchdown, and two interceptions while being sacked five times during the loss. The first half was better than the second as the Bucs’ offensive barrage allowed the defense to tee off on the rookie, which was something Allen noted in his assessment.
“Overall, I thought he did some good things,” Allen said, via a transcript from the team. “There were some encouraging things, some things he’s going to learn from, from a mistake standpoint on his part. I don’t think we did enough around him to help him. It was hard for us to be able to run the football. I thought they really won the interior part of the line of scrimmage, really probably on both sides of the ball on the line of scrimmage. I thought he did some things really well early in the game, in particular the first half. In the second half, it kind of went on. I thought they started pressuring him a little bit more. We weren’t able to be as good in protection, which made it a little more challenging for him.”
Allen said he intends to stick with Rattler against the Broncos on Thursday night and he’ll be spending the next few days trying to come up with a better team effort around him.