Captain Fear
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- Mar 20, 2019
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Buccaneers head coach Bruce Arians has made it clear that he does not want to see linebacker Shaq Barrett leave the team as a free agent this offseason and Barrett isn’t the only player he hopes to see back on defense in 2020.
Tampa’s defense has been playing its best football over the last few weeks — 14 takeaways and 22 sacks in the last seven games — and Arians wants to see the same guys back to build on that next year.
“If we can keep this defense together, we can be really really good defensively for a long time,” Arians said, via Eduardo Encina of the Tampa Bay Times. “It’s a very young group, and the older guys are young. They’re guys who don’t age. It will be huge for us to keep them together and build off the way we’re finishing the last six, seven weeks, the growth in the secondary especially.”
The secondary is young, which makes it easier to keep the group together than the front seven. Jason Pierre-Paul and Ndamukong Suh join Barrett as impending free agents, so keeping the entire band together may be difficult given the need to sort out their quarterback plans and other spots on the field.