Is Alex Cappa Lost At Sea?
3 min read
The Buccaneers are just like any other team in the league, they’re never satisfied with what they’ve done, or where they’re at, and that’s the way a team should look at things. There is always something you can do better as a player, a coach, and a team. There are mistakes, no matter how small, that can be corrected to make sure they don’t happen again. Your time off the line could be a split second faster, your move to the ball could be just a little bit faster, your route could be a little more crisp and clean, that one block you didn’t hold long enough could have been a little longer, no matter what it is, you work to clean it up and improve upon it.
That’s why I always find it odd when to see someone claim that a person isn’t where a team wants them to be in regard to any variety of things from learning the playbook to being in game shape to hitting the target downfield. Every player works day in and day out to improve upon where they are, because they are not where they want to be, nor where the team wants them to be. Once you improve upon where you were last week, then you have to improve tomorrow on where you were today. Once you reach that goal or milestone, you have to immediately start working towards that next one.
Alex Cappa is a good example, as just a few days ago, Jenna Laine of ESPN, reported that she had heard (from who we do not know) that Alex Cappa “still isn’t where they’d like him to be yet.” Not only do we not know who she heard this from, but we also don’t know who they are or where they want him to be. Is he simply not in the physical shape that Maral Javadifar would like him to be in? Is he not getting the positioning right for blocking that Joe Gilbert thinks he should? Is he not getting the hang of the playbook that Byron Leftwich gave him to study? Is it entirely possible that Cappa is in fact not having any issues when it comes to being where they’d like him to be? Without knowing who “they” are or where “they’d like him to be”, it’s impossible to know if it’s a simple fix or something that goes deep enough that we could see his spot on the team go to someone else prior to the start of the season. As we’ve been told otherwise.
With Cappa spending most of last season on the bench under a coaching staff that was inept, to say the least, there’s really no way to gauge exactly what Cappa is capable of in a game setting, but the fact we saw interceptions drop drastically around the time he was brought off the bench speaks well to how he can contribute. Another good note for Cappa is that right guard Caleb Benenoch is being moved to tackle in what we assume will be a backup role to Donovan Smith, and this will give Cappa the perfect opportunity to take over the starting spot and prove why the Buccaneers drafted him in the 3rd round of the 2018 draft. At 6’6” and over 300lbs, Cappa definitely has the size to provide the necessary protection for Jameis, and with Gilbert being brought in to help coach and teach him, there’s no reason to expect that we’ll not see Cappa in far more games than we saw him play last season.
Training camp has yet to even start, the pre-season is still over a month away, and there’s plenty of time for Cappa to get “where they’d like him to be”, no matter what “they” might be saying.
