TAMPA, Fla. — As Nolan Carroll watched the Bucs’ win over the Falcons on TV on Sunday, he saw his own past.
As he saw a breakout game from a young Tampa Bay defensive secondary, Carroll saw his old coach, Bucs defensive coordinator Todd Bowles, working with an extremely young group of players, as he had a decade earlier in Miami.
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“Even though we were young, we never saw it that way,” said Carroll, now retired after eight years in the NFL. “We just saw it as ‘We don’t want people to think we’re the weak link of the team. We need to play our butts off.’ You saw that in the game (Sunday). To have a group of guys who are all experiencing the same thing, it helps a lot. To have a coach like Todd Bowles to be able to guide you and teach you, he’s always going to hold you to a high standard.”
The Bucs are remarkably young in the secondary, with three rookies (corners Sean Murphy-Bunting and Jamel Dean and safety Mike Edwards) and two second-year players (corner Carlton Davis and safety Jordan Whitehead) among their top six defensive backs. The group has taken their lumps this year as they learned on the field, but Bowles has been in this position before.
He was the Dolphins’ secondary coach in 2009 when Miami used first- and second-round picks on corners Vontae Davis and Sean Smith. They also took safety Chris Clemons in the fifth round, then took Carroll and safety Reshad Jones in the fifth round in 2010. The five played a ton of snaps together, along with veteran safety Yeremiah Bell, who would serve in the same role for Bowles and Bruce Arians in their first year in Arizona in 2013.
“They were all puppies at the same time,” Bowles said of that Miami group. “It’s not about how young you are, it’s how much you can play and how much you can retain.”
By 2011, the defensive secondary was an asset for the Dolphins, even as they struggled as a team. Miami opened 0-7 that year, losing low-scoring games by such margins as 17-16, 18-15 and 20-17. Then they held three consecutive opponents to less than 10 points, winning four of five games to finish that year with the NFL’s No. 6 scoring defense. That wasn’t enough to keep Tony Sparano from getting fired in December, but they went 2-1 with Bowles as interim head coach. Davis and Jones made it to two Pro Bowls each, and Jones is now in his 10th season with the Dolphins.
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The Bucs, very similarly, have trusted in their youth. They opted not to re-sign veterans Brent Grimes and Chris Conte after last season, and while they did add 31-year-old safety Darian Stewart in training camp, he has played only 11 defensive snaps since the season opener. Former first-round pick Vernon Hargreaves was cut outright two weeks ago, shifting even more focus to a core group of players drafted in the last two years.
Tampa Bay has invested heavily in the secondary through the draft — in 2018, they added corners M.J. Stewart and Davis in the second round and Whitehead in the fourth; this spring, they took Murphy-Bunting in the second and Dean and Edwards in the third round. So out of 11 picks in the top four rounds over the last two drafts, six have been defensive backs.
The Bucs wanted ballhawks in their secondary — last year, they had one interception as a team in their first 10 games; this year, they at least had six. Murphy-Bunting got his first pick against the Saints, Dean had a huge interception against Arizona to set up a 92-yard, game-winning touchdown drive, and Davis, still only 22, finally notched his first interception Sunday in the win against Atlanta.
“It’s a great feeling, a long time coming, but hopefully more to come,” Davis said. “I just grabbed it and tried to hold on as hard as I can. In Tennessee, I had two taken back (by penalties), so I was very hungry to get back out there and get one.”
Murphy-Bunting played just 14 defensive snaps in the first month of the season, but now has become an every-down player, and said the three rookies have helped each other, both on the field and in practice and in the classroom.
“Week in, week out, we’re growing up together, getting comfortable playing with each other,” he said. “It’s starting to show a lot more. I’ve gotten used to the stamina part of it, the mental part of it all. We all feed off each other. These past few weeks, we’ve been in the film room a lot more than ever before. That’s before meetings, after meetings, after practice, just doing a lot of extra stuff because we’re all in that same learning curve.”
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Dean, now tied for second in the NFL with 13 passes defensed despite only playing defense in three games, said a greater focus on preparation has been a central part of the young defensive backs’ maturation this season.
“The key is preparing before the game, so you have an idea to anticipate when they’re throwing at you,” Dean said. “Then it’s up to you to trust what you see and make the play. Having a couple of games under my belt, I feel like I’m more relaxed on the field now. We’re all feeding off each other. We have the experience now to play our game.”
Many of the young defensive backs were drafted with positional flexibility in mind. So while Davis and Dean are exclusively outside corners, Murphy-Bunting can go at nickel or corner, Edwards has played at nickel and safety, as can M.J. Stewart, who is currently out with a knee injury. The Bucs continue to try different combinations to find the right mix, but Sunday’s opening look — Davis and Dean outside, Murphy-Bunting at nickel, Whitehead at safety and Edwards and Andrew Adams rotating at the other safety spot — seems to be working well.
In Sunday’s win against Atlanta, the Bucs finished with 16 passes defensed, including five each from Davis and Dean, showing a more active, aggressive approach to get their hands on the ball. The defense also dropped four or five potential interceptions, but the breakups were a step in the right direction, having had three or fewer passes defensed in five separate losses this year.
“I thought we dropped quite a few of them we should have had, but any time we get our hands on balls, it’s always a good thing,” said Bowles, pleased to see Atlanta’s Julio Jones limited to 68 yards on nine targets.
Echoed Arians: “I’d like to have seen 12 (passes defensed) and four interceptions because we dropped four right in our hands. We should put them all on the JUGS (machine) next week. But yeah, we were in tight coverage. They studied it, they knew what was happening and they were anticipating, maybe for the first time that I saw. (The) young guys, they know what was coming and the played it well.”
The Bucs’ pass defense has struggled with their youth this season, but the hope is that by next year, they’re vastly improved as a result of what they learned in 2019, even in losses. The same was true with the Dolphins almost a decade earlier.
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“The bad plays, the bad games, it didn’t feel as bad because we knew it was a learning experience,” Carroll said. “A lot of things going on in a game we’d never seen before, plays, opponents. For us, it was good because we held each other accountable. Watching the game (Sunday), it was cool to see that. Hey, we went through this back in 2010. Building your confidence as a young guy is very important when you come into the league, and when they say, ‘You go out there and cover 11 (Jones), one of the best receivers in the league,’ it shows the same confidence he had in us as young guys, that he had complete faith and trust in us.”
In the remaining five games, those young Bucs defensive backs have an audition of sorts, a chance to show that their development can account for the improvement needed in the defense’s future, that Tampa Bay doesn’t need to invest more high draft picks or write any big checks in free agency. Bowles said he has seen what his secondary is capable of doing, so there’s a priority to give them the experience they need to correct their youthful mistakes.
“You’ve seen them play well, so we’ve just got to continue to keep grinding and get better,” he said.
(Top photo of Carlton Davis celebrating his interception against Atlanta: Jason Getz / USA Today)