A total of five fights went down on Thursday in the joint practice between the Bucs and Titans. The last of them saw Bucs’ star linebacker Devin White in the mix, lifting up a Titans player and taking him to the ground. White had to be separated by his own teammates as the pile-up between both teams grew larger.

You could say that it got heated out there when you have five different fights.  That’s just the nature of the game when there’s so many players going at it with high energy against a different opponent for two straight days.

“Great practice, a lot of grown men competing with emotions,” White said to the media after. “Things happen, you got to protect everybody.”

So what exactly went down in White’s situation?

“I was just trying to help one of my brothers,” White said. “I just saw one of my brothers get tossed around so I decided to help him. That’s all.”

When asked which teammate specifically he was helping out, White didn’t even know. He was just defending his own guys because that’s what a leader does.

“I really don’t know,” White said. “It was one of our corners,  DBs, safeties or somebody. It was after a run play, I really couldn’t tell you. Most of it goes, you see your same color jersey with two jerseys of the opposite color and you want to go get your guy.” 

The Bucs were looking to bounce back from a mistake-filled practice on Wednesday. You could tell the focus and intensity level was higher on both sides of the ball, which may have added to so many of these dust-ups. For the defense it started with getting back to what they do best – stopping the run.

“We know we have to get geared up for a lot of practice reps against those guys,” White said. “Our coach told us every day to treat it like a game. They got a lot of big runs on us yesterday. We went back to the drawing board like it was halftime and came back out and finished those plays up. Basically we beat us in the running game, everybody knows who we are in the running game.”