The PR Bucs Monday Mailbag is where PewterReport.com’s Mark Cook answers your questions from our Twitter account. You can submit your question each week via Twitter using the hashtag #PRMailbag.

Below are the questions we chose for this week’s edition of the PR Bucs Monday Mailbag.

Question: Will the crowd noise being pumped in be used according to what goes on on the field, or is it just going to be steady like the scrimmage?

Answer: It’s still to be determined. It was very odd sitting in Raymond James Stadium last Friday and hearing the fake piped in crowd noise. There was no cheering for good plays or booing for bad, it was just a steady stream of noise. Even Bucs quality quarterback Tom Brady commented on it following the scrimmage.

Bruce Arians and Tom Brady – Photo by: Cliff Welch/PR

“The communication is tough, and you don’t have a down moment, so you’re screaming the whole day to people on the sideline, which is very unique to the game because normally it ebbs and flows. With that pumped in crowd noise, it doesn’t ebb and flow – it just flows. We’re going to have to get used to that.”

Of all the other sports I have watched since they began playing again, the NHL is one – from the camera angles to the crows noises and arena sounds – that makes me forget there isn’t a live audience the most and is doing it the best. It will be curious to see how the NFL and the NCAA handle it. In football, the crowd is such a big part of the game from an emotional standpoint, and it will be odd if the NFL and NCAA can’t figure out a way to capture as much of that feel as possible.

NBC Sports’ Peter King reported this in his Football Morning In America column on Monday: “The Competition Committee will have to determine the decibel levels that can be used while games are being played, but rest assured that there will be some sort of low hum consistently inside the venues. The league doesn’t want to make it easy for teams to find patterns’ in opponents verbal signals and cadences. ‘There’s got to be an audible hum of some sort,’ one GM told me. ‘There can’t be silence. There’s too much teams can learn from each other if there’s no noise and you hear everything they’re saying.'”

The good news is, at least in some venues, there will be some actual fans in the stands. I suspect the Buccaneers will be announcing their intentions of having fans in the stands in the next week.

Question: Is the Bucs’ kicking game the most questionable position on the team at this point?

Answer: An argument can be made for that position, without a doubt. Kickers are rarely perfect, but the Buccaneers have been struggling for much of the time since Matt Bryant was cut and went to the Falcons following the 2008 season. There were some decent kickers mixed in over the last 12 years, players like Connor Barth and even Pat Murray, but consistency has really been lacking at the positiokn.

For the Buccaneers that consistency really hurt them in 2020. We all know about Matt Gay’s last-second, missed 34-yard field goal the Giants, and his 0-for-3 day to end the season in an overtime loss against Atlanta. If Gay makes one of his three misses against the Falcons in Week 17, Jameis Winston doesn’t throw a pick-6 in overtime, the team finishes 8-8 and maybe Winston is the quarterback under center this year.

Of course many would like to pat Gay on the back for those three misses, as it led to Tom Brady and Rob Gronkowski becoming Buccaneers this offseason.

Bucs K Matt Gay – Photo by: Cliff Welch/PR

Tampa Bay really need to get the position solidified this season. In a year where expectations are at an all time him, having at least two game lost on missed field goals can be the difference between winning the division or missing the playoffs entirely.

And it looks like the team it addressing the inconsistency with reports that Cody Parkey and Ryan Succop could be brought in this week to compete with Gay and Elliott Fry, who started off camp hot, but has cooled considerably.

Parkey has had his own struggles in the past, just ask Bears fans, but has connected on 84.3 percent of his kicks in his six years in the league, including the 2017 season in Miami when he made 91.3 percent of his field goals.

Succop, who is entering his 12th year in the NFL, has made 82.2 percent of the field goals in his career that spanned five years in Kansas City and the last six seasons in Tennessee. He connected on 86.7 percent of his kicks in 2018 before starting the 2019 season 1-of-6 before he was released.

As much grief as we give Bucs GM Jason Licht for drafting Roberto Aguayo in the second round in 2016, we have to also give him credit. Is there a position he has tried to solidify more than kicker since he has been here? From Murray (twice) to Barth to Kyle Brindza, to Aguayo, to Nick Folk to Chandler Catanzaro to now Gay and perhaps Succop or Parkey, Licht understands the importance of reliability at the position. He just hasn’t found a reliable kicker yet.

Question: What are the chances Ronald Jones II is not only the early down back, but also takes most of the pass-catching opportunities this season?

Answer: Ronald Jones II has been the most impressive of all the Bucs’ backs this training camp by a wide margin, and is a better receiver than when he arrived as a rookie in 2018. But if the scrimmage tells us anything, it is he won’t be a focus in the passing game. He will have some opportunities of course, but either LeSean McCoy or Dare Ogunbowale will the leading receivers out the backfield in 2020.

Bucs RB Ronald Jones II – Photo by: Cliff Welch/PR

Besides the fact that Jones just isn’t a natural receiver, he will likely be the workhorse on first and second downs, so keeping him fresh is probably more important than trying to make him a three-down back. And that is really something that has turned into a thing of the past where running backs were routinely 400-touch-a-season guys 25 years ago.

Question: How competitive have the Bucs’ practices been compared to last years camp? Both sides of the ball seem to have had their moments.

Answer: Every year there is optimism, and it is hard to keep it in check. I remember raving about the Josh McCown camp in 2014 and how he looked like Tom Brady out there that year behind One Buc. And he did look tremendous. There were days when his passes hardly hit the turf.

But as Scott Reynolds has pointed out, it wasn’t so much that McCown looked great. Rather, it was that Tampa Bay’s Tampa 2 defense under Lovie Smith was just awful that year, and made McCown look like a Hall of Famer in practice. As it turns out, the Bucs defense and McCown were both brutally bad during the 2014 season, which ended with a dismal 2-14 record.

LBs Devin White and Lavonte David – photo by: Cliff Welch/PR

So with that said, I have tried to not over-hype either side of the ball. But if I am being honest, it is very much more competitive this year versus last season, particularly on the defensive side where I suspect all of the Tom Brady and Rob Gronkowski hype has placed a little chip on the shoulders of the defense. Tampa Bay’s defense wants to feel like it will also be part of the solution to solve the riddle of 12 straight non-playoff seasons for the organization, and not just rely on Brady and the offense having to score 30 points per game to provide the Bucs with a win on Sundays.

Tampa Bay’s defense is a confident unit right now and with good reason. The defense ended 2019 as a Top 10 unit over the last six games of the year and believe that the last six-game performance is much more indicative of what that unit is rather than the first 10 game when it was pretty bad at times, especially against the pass.