Mike Evans has been ejected once, suspended twice, and banned from a New Orleans restaurant for starting fights with Marshon Lattimore. He says he’s more mature now:
Still, it remains a spirited rivalry, and Evans said he’s taking the high road. That doesn’t mean he isn’t looking forward to scrapping with Lattimore as long as their teams remain division opponents.
“Long as, you know, it’s within the play,” Evans told the Tampa Bay Times’ Rick Stroud. “I’ve done a bad job in the past of making it go over the play when I shouldn’t have. But I’m more mature now and our team is focused on playing winning ball, and you can’t play winning ball when you get kicked out and things like that.”
Evans added that while you want to bring fire and energy and passion into the game, you can’t act irrationally because of it and hurt your team. That’s a balance he’s struggled to maintain in the past, and it doesn’t help that Lattimore consistently shuts him down. Evans has had a nice career. He’s averaged 4.9 catches and 75.2 yards per game over the years. But in a dozen previous games with Lattimore he’s had 5 or more receptions just once while beating that yardage average only twice.
“But I definitely want to have that fire and be physical and a little chirping never hurts. But you definitely have got to be smart,” Evans added.
There’s a lot to be said for letting your hands doing the talking, but Evans would be better served catching passes than throwing punches.
Buccaneers coach Todd Bowles actually has a good point on his team’s rivalry with the Saints. They’ve got to start winning some games to call this a proper feud:
Hey, when he’s right, he’s right. In this case you’ve got to hand it to him. Tampa Bay Buccaneers right tackle Tristan Wirfs shared a message from his team’s head coach Todd Bowles on Wednesday in speaking with local media ahead of their game with the New Orleans Saints. These games have become really intense in recent years with Tom Brady arriving in the NFC South and the Saints refusing to make it easy for him.
They’ve almost taken on the air of a rivalry. But as Wirfs relayed from a team meeting, “Coach Bowles said today it’s not a rivalry unless, you know, there’s some give and take.” New Orleans has won six of their last seven games with the Buccaneers, sweeping them in regular season meetings in 2021, 2020, and 2019.
Wirfs acknowledged that his squad hasn’t played its best against New Orleans, telling the Tampa Bay Times’ Rick Stroud that there’s been too many self-inflicted wounds: “One game it could be shooting ourselves in the foot with penalties, or next game, we get the penalties under control and then we give the ball to them and we’re turning it over.” He emphasized that the team needs to refine its fundamentals, technique, and take the field with a good attitude and play with good effort.
Still, it’ll take more than better execution to level out the 39-21 all-time record the Saints have achieved against Tampa Bay. They’ve defeated the Buccaneers more than any other team besides their Week 1 opponent (the Atlanta Falcons, their real rivals, who have put together a nice and tidy 53-53 record against New Orleans in their long-running feud). If the Buccaneers would begin to sweep the Saints every year, it would take Tampa Bay nine years to even the scales, and another win after that to tip them back in their favor. Wirfs, drafted two years ago, would be 33 years old.
So, yeah, Bowles is right: this isn’t a rivalry. Buccaneers fans are so starving for relevance that they’re trying to force the issue, but in this case they need to listen to their head coach and all-star lineman. Until their team starts to win some games against the Saints, they’ll continue to be an afterthought for fans in New Orleans.
Brooks Koepka doesn’t see why his public spat with Bryson DeChambeau would negatively impact the Ryder Cup, or golf in general.
RIDGELAND, S.C. – Brooks Koepka doesn’t think his public spat with Bryson DeChambeau will disrupt team chemistry and cause any damaging tension come Ryder Cup time if both are wearing the red, white and blue.
No, the friction between the top-10 players in the world that has played out on social media won’t lead U.S. captain Steve Stricker to start pulling out his hair or asking one of his vice captains to make sure the two are in separate corners in September at Whistling Straits in Wisconsin.
“I don’t see why it would,” the four-time major champion said Wednesday ahead of Thursday’s start in the Palmetto Championship at Congaree. “There’s only eight guys that are playing, four guys are sitting. I play with one other guy. I don’t understand (why it would matter).
“Let’s say I don’t play with Bryson or Bryson doesn’t play with me; he takes care of his match, and I would take care of my match, and I don’t know how that has any effect. What you do off the golf course doesn’t have any effect on the golf course.”
Its crescendo – for now – came last week in the Memorial at Muirfield Village in Ohio, when Koepka wasn’t even playing. DeChambeau was playing, however, and he was repeatedly heckled by pro-Brooks fans who were calling DeChambeau “Brooksie.” A few fans were removed from the tournament (not at the request of DeChambeau) and Koepka later put out a video offering free beer to anyone whose day was cut short because of their taunts.
“I really do. The fact that golf’s on pretty much every news outlet for about two weeks pretty consistently, I think that’s a good thing,” he said. “It’s growing the game. I get the traditionalists who don’t agree with it. I understand that, but I think to grow the game you’ve got to reach out to the younger generation. I don’t want to say that’s what this is, but it’s reaching out to a whole bunch of people. It’s getting golf in front of people. I think it’s good for the game.”
At the PGA, Koepka was doing an interview Friday when he was clearly thrown off by the sound – and likely sight – of DeChambeau. He rolled his eyes, lost his train of thought and dropped a few expletives. The video was not supposed to see the light of day but somehow reached social media circles and quickly went viral before it was removed.
“It doesn’t bother me, honestly,” Koepka said when asked if the video’s release upset him. “I’m OK with anything I do. I don’t really live with regrets. It’s nothing I’m terribly upset about. From everybody I spoke to, it is what it is and move on.
“He didn’t say anything to me. He wasn’t speaking to me. He was saying something about how he hit a perfect shot and it shouldn’t have been there, and it was just very, very loud. With the media right there, you kind of know, hey, look, we’re all kind of in this area, just tone it down, and it was just so loud. Then I think he realized that he had gotten right behind me, and he toned it down a little bit, but I just lost my train of thought, which I think was pretty obvious.”
While he struggled with his surgically repaired right knee but managed to finish in a tie for second behind Wanamaker Trophy winner Phil Mickelson. During his off time the past two weeks, Koepka said the knee has improved.
“It feels probably better than ever,” he said. “Doing kind of a quad stretch. My foot can kind of touch my butt for the first time, so the knee is months and months ahead of schedule. It feels really good, just being able to do work, doing some Pilates, just started that. I think a lot of this has really helped. I know Dr. (Neal) ElAttrache is very pleased, Mark Wall, physio. Everyone is very happy.
“I’m playing good. I like the way everything’s been going. My body’s getting better and better every day, feeling more comfortable doing things on the golf course that maybe I couldn’t do from Augusta to PGA. It’s just getting better and better every day. So I’m very pleased and like my chances.”
Brooks Koepka on the 17th green during the first round of the Masters. (Photo: Michael Madrid-USA TODAY Sports)
That goes for this week and at next week’s U.S. Open, which he won in 2017 at Erin Hills and 2018 at Shinnicock.
“I like playing before the U.S. Open, and I’m under repped this whole year. I haven’t played much,” said Koepka, who has finished just 24 competitive rounds in 2021 (he won the Waste Management Phoenix Open in February). “The big thing is just getting big reps under my belt. I felt like I played good at Kiawah. I liked the way I played, putted iffy, didn’t putt too well, but it’s one of those things where I felt like maybe if I had a few more rounds kind of going through the year and was a little more comfortable, it might have been, I guess maybe easier for me.
“So that’s part of the reason why I wanted to play this week. I need to play. I haven’t played enough out here to really feel like, hey, man, I’ve got this shot. I feel comfortable with everything we’re working on, and now that the knee’s not really an issue anymore, it’s getting a lot freer and able to hit golf shots and read putts, get down there fully without bigger effort to get down to read it.”
