Derrick Brooks – Time To Move On

Back in February the Tampa Bay Buccaneers released Derrick Brooks a 14-year vet. Ever since his release Brooks has said that he wants to play one more season but has received very little interest from NFL teams. He’s even stated that he would go back to Tampa if welcomed. Unfortunately for him the team and possibly the league has moved on.

The Bucs started their three-day minicamp today and Coach Raheem Morris is very happy with the pieces he has. In fact he’s so happy with the linebackers on his team that he addressed the Derrick Brooks situation.

“You never want to say no to anything,’’ Morris told the Tampa Tribune. “You never want to be that way, period. But we’ve made plans, we’ve moved on. We went out and got Angelo Crowell; we moved Jermaine Phillips to linebacker and we’ve got Barrett Ruud.”

More importantly thou is the depth Tampa has. They’ve got Quincy Black, Geno Hayes, Niko Koutouvides and Jamal Johnson. All guys who can prove to be very useful in substitute packages. So as you see there isn’t much room for Brooks.

After the career Brooks has had its hard to believe he can’t compete with those guys. I’d think he could still be a valuable backup, don’t you? Yea, I know he had a very big drop off in performance last season but he can’t help that unit?

Morris also said “We actually felt pretty good about our linebackers going into the draft, so we just want to see what we have going on.’’ That right there tells me they’ve definitely moved on.

The question really is should Brooks move on, from football in general? Last season, Brooks did rack up 73 tackles. That’s a pretty big drop from the 109 in 2007. If you look back to 2004 he had 137 so he actually has had almost a 50% drop in five years. Rushing the passer has never been a part of his game but he hasn’t even tallied a sack since 2005.

Even so, I think Brooks could provide some value off a teams bench. When I first started this article I thought I’d end by saying he should hang it up. But after thinking about it, how can he?

There’s no way you can tell me he can’t be useful. If you pay him just the league minimum he could easily give you a very productive 10 to 15 plays a game. But even bigger then that, he could be a tutor to the young guys. Who better to learn from then an All-Pro?

I’ve always been a fan of Brooks so hopefully he can catch on somewhere. If not at least he’s had a great career, arguably a Hall Of Fame career.

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Tags: Derrick Brooks, NFL, Tampa Bay Buccaneers