Buccaneers

Buccaneers WR Jalen McMillan appears ready to make his season debut in Week 2 after missing the season opener with a knee injury. Tampa Bay WR Emeka Egbuka thinks McMillan’s downfield route running with strong hands will make the offense much harder to stop.

“He is super dynamic and is a downfield threat, great routes, is always going to get open, consistent hands; kind of just everything that you want out of a wide receiver,” Egbuka said, via the team’s website. “It just makes us that much more difficult to guard. We have a lot of dynamic pieces.”

Cowboys

Dallas’ defense didn’t get off to the start they wanted in DC Christian Parker’s debut after allowing 28 points in a loss to the Giants. Parker praised the Giants’ performance but thinks much of what went wrong can be corrected going forward, such as bad eyes, block destruction, etc. 

“I think that [this is about] handling our stuff — you know, our execution, things that we can own, things that we can control,” Parker said, via the team’s website. “That’s the most important thing. [The Giants] played a good game, so hats off to them but, at the end of the day, it’s about we can control what we can do. We didn’t do that to our standard, or to our level of performance.”

“We were watching film, and these are fixable mistakes. This is what they did versus this is what we did: losing leverage, eyes in the wrong place. block destruction, all those types of things. Those are things that we can handle internally. We have a lot of confidence in our ability to do so.”

“I think the meetings, everybody was accountable, including me. I showed them the plays that I was referencing, that I didn’t feel great about. Then, we showed the good and the bad throughout the game, and how we can build upon that, and correct those.”

Panthers

Brad Idzik is in his third season as the Panthers’ offensive coordinator, but is calling plays for the first time in his career. Idzik said he’s gotten some nervousness about his new role, but views it as a good thing. 

“If you don’t have nerves, I don’t think you care,” Idzik said, via Kassidy Hill of the team’s site. “So I think the nerves are a good thing. It’s not a nervousness in a bad way. It’s a nervousness because I’m juiced up. I’m ready to go, and I think our players feel the same way.”

As for Carolina’s 59-37 loss to the Bears in Week 1, Idzik was pleased to see them put up a lot of points, but noticed some things they need to correct. 

“The crazy thing is, you put up a good amount of points, but you go back, and you watch the film, and you’re like, ‘Wow, we should have had the same game that they had; we should have just kept rolling,'” Idzik said. “When we poured into the film the next day, I just showed two of our touchdown drives, so you can show them the positivity of like, ‘Look, we marched down the field and we scored on these two drives, but there were so many elements in there that were fixable, that we can take steps forward.’ So it was a great opportunity for us to say, like, ‘Hey, we focus on our part; this could be so much better on our end too,’ and you love to be able to coach hard in those moments when you do put up points and guys feel maybe a little bit better about themselves than they would if they were struggling to score, but there’s so much room to grow.”