The guy with the Bucs’ only touchdown grab this season is feeling pretty darn good. His head coach just told a national audience about his work ethic, and Sunday’s win against Carolina revealed that success should come easier for him this season. Joe talked to Mike Williams about this stuff today.

JoeBucsFan.com: Speaking on SiriusXM NFL Radio this week, Coach Schiano raved about how you’ve been really busting your “hump” in practice and he’s impressed? What’s changed with how you’re working now?

Mike Williams: Nothing’s really changed. You can even ask the coaches from last year. That’s one thing that I really try and stress for myself, to bust myself down in practice, work as hard as I can. That’s how I feel. I’ve got to do that. It’s just the first time these coaches have seen me do it, so I take it as a compliment. I take it as that’s my job. I have to work as hard as I can in practice to actually keep a spot and help this team win.

Joe: I know you have played a lot of basketball in past offseasons. Did you do anything different to prepare for this season?

Williams: Same thing. I play a lot of basketball. I stay in shape and try to be in my best shape for the start of camp. I did the same thing, played basketball and came to camp.

Joe: Coach also mentioned how he could tell already how you didn’t get the coverages rolled your way like last year and how excited he is for what you can do going forward? Did you feel a difference against Carolina with Vincent Jackson getting more attention?

Mike Williams: Oh, yeah. We got a lot of cover 4 coverages and he got the two-high coverages on his side a lot of the time in passing situations. So it felt a lot different. It felt good, too.

Update, 4:34 p.m.: The official injury report says Blount has a neck injury.

Update, 7:00 p.m.:  The Tampa Bay Times is reporting Blount is cleared to play and will practice tomorrow.

Greg Schiano dumped cold water on various theories surrounding LeGarrette Blount’s attitude and work ethic.

Schiano said at his news conference that Blount has been a “good” worker. “There haven’t been any problems with LeGarrette,” Schiano said. “He’s a team guy.”

Schiano also said Blount’s medical issues being explored are simply the result of team doctors looking for answers. Blount was scheduled for MRI tests today.

“When things don’t add up, you keep digging,” Schiano said.

The link between the Super Bowl champion Giants and the Bucs doesn’t just start with the assistant coaches the Bucs hired from the Giants in the offseason, nor Eli Manning’s budding friendship with Bucs quarterback Josh Freeman.

No, the link goes back to when Tom Coughlin was coaching the Jags and Schiano was looking to NFL pastures when he was a secondary coach at Penn State.

“I interviewed Greg one time when I was at Jacksonville and he went to Chicago,” Coughlin told the Tampa Bay pen and mic club via teleconference this afternoon. “I have followed [Schiano’s] career from a distance and was very much aware of his presence at Rutgers and on occasion visited with Greg. I think highly of him.”

Both Schiano and Coughlin drink from the same football well. Coughlin, along with Bill Belicheat, were two main branches rooted to the Bill Parcells coaching tree. Schiano is a Belicheat disciple through and through.

So while the Bucs may have knowledge of the Giants’ inner-workings though Schiagno’s dealings with Coughlin and both Bucs coordinators having worked under Coughlin, so too does Coughlin know the Bucs.

“The entire [Bucs win over Carolina] was a positive relection of Greg and his values and what he has tried to instill on his team,” Coughlin said.

The man Bucs fans hope Gerald McCoy will toss around like a ragdoll Sunday, Eli Manning, took to the WFAN-AM New York sports radio airwaves yesterday and referenced multiple times how the Giants need to jack up their intensity for the Bucs.

Manning made it clear that the Super Bowl champs lost their edge in their home opener.

“It was a wakeup call, and we kind of got used to winning,” Manning said of the Giants’ opening-night loss to Dallas. “We got to get back to the way we worked late in the season last year. Just our intensity, the way we came out and practiced each week. And so it’s about getting into that rhythm, and hopefully we’ll get back into it this week.”

One could say the Bucs are catching the Giants at the wrong time, an angry, re-focused team desperate for a win at home. Or one could say the Bucs get the Giants at the just the right time. Tampa Bay is healthy and New York is still finding its footing and might have had their confidence shaken a bit in Week 1.

Regardless, Joe expects an extraordinarily physical football game Sunday, a great measuring stick for the New Schiano Order.

Those Gators are supposed to be pretty smart, and it seems Ahmad Black is perpetuating that perception.

Black has been glued to Ronde Barber for months, so Barber explained last night on Total Access on WDAE-AM 620.

“Every single workout I’ve done this offseason, I’ve done it with Ahmad Black,” Barber said. “So, you know, I’ve spent a bunch of time with him in these past couple of months. There’s a lot of things that I probably don’t even realize I’m doing that’s rubbing off on these [young players]. I hope that it is because that’s how it was for me. And whenever my mentoring days are over here, whenever that is, I hope some of what I’ve learned over my 15 years going 16 years in the league rubs off on them. And the position in general is better off, that’s how guys always presented it to me when I was young, that when they left part of them was still with me and it made me a better player. Hopefully it’s the same going forward with all the guys I’m working with now.”

Barber’s always been known as a mentor to his young mates in the Bucs secondary, but this interview and others done by Barber recently lead Joe to believe Barber has embraced the role more than ever before. This is such a good thing for Black, Mark Barron and others.

Below is the entire interview with Barber, who details his rehab from a severely broken arm and more. Barber also explains how Greg Schiano wanted to know if Barber could jump before he moved him to safety. Barber was a bit insulted and explained that he could dunk a basketball “if I could palm it.”

It’s starting to get weird about the Bucs and LeGarrette Blount.

Blount was taken out of the game Sunday after being injured in some way — he was tended to while lying on the ground — and never played again, though later coach Greg Schiano said he could have played, but added he didn’t know what was wrong with Blount (nevermind Schiano has direct access to team trainers).

To Joe’s untrained eye, it appeared Blount may have had a cramp.

After the game while in the bowels of the stadium on Dale Mabry Highway, Joe witnessed Blount running off the field and into the tunnel to the locker room at a brisk pace; he was the very first player off the field. Just a few brief moments later, Joe witnessed Blount sprinting out of the Bucs locker room and exiting the stadium, well before media was granted access to the Bucs locker room.

To Joe’s untrained eyes, Blount didn’t seem injured but it was very curious to Joe why Blount didn’t want to celebrate the upset win with his teammates on the field and why he was in such a mad rush to get out of the stadium. The fact he dodged media members makes Joe immediately wonder just what he is hiding?

Well, late this morning, Bucs rock star general manager Mark Dominik accounced via the Bucs official Twitter feed that Blount will have an MRI on his neck and back and a concussion has been ruled out by team officials.

@TBBuccaneers: Blount will get an MRI on his neck and his back. Dominik says player safety always comes first. … GM Mark Dominik says RB LeGarrette Blount will not be at practice today. Dominik says Blount definitely does NOT have a concussion.

Joe just smells something odd here. No, Joe’s not looking for conspiracies under rocks or trying to connect dots that are not there, but adding everything up, it just seems weird.

As we all know, former Bucs great defensive tackle Warren Sapp had to declare bankruptcy. As a result, Sapp is selling his Windermere pad, a mere four-bed, eight-bath (?), 15,162-square foot, 2.90-acre man cave. It can be yours for a cool $3,774,000.

Let’s take a tour, shall we?

Welcome to Casa Sapp.

Nothing like fine dining at Casa Sapp where the servants are there to tend to your every want and need.

Nothing like a wood-fired oven in your kitchen.

This is where Sapp’s paramours began the long climb to his lair.

Guessing this is the Florida room.

Somehow, it seems that tub would be a tight squeeze for Sapp.

What happened to the naked woman painting?

Has to be a virtual fireplace. Look at the remotes.

Something tells Joe that Sapp was never able to use this watersled.

What’s a central Florida mansion without backyard fishing and a trail for gators to come up to the back door?

Hat tip TheBigLead. Photos courtesy of Realtor.com.

Click for a .pdf of the delicious Slice Masters menu

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For a shot to win the  jersey, all you have to do is “Like” Slicemasters on Facebook, and they’ll be picking a winner among their Facebook friends.

For free pizza, email joe@joebucsfan.com with your name and physical address — subject line Pizza — and Joe will pick winners for several free extra large pizzas with toppings. Tampa addresses only, please.

Gotham is getting nervous. The Super Bowl champs lost their season opener and now face the undefeated Bucs at the New Jersey Swamplands this week. It seems some believe this game is a must-win for the Giants — in the second week of the season! — in this episode of SNY’S “Loud Mouths.”

Joe’s friends at Ed Morse Cadillac Tampa have the best service deals around. So why go get your car fixed at some chain tire shop dump when you can have top-shelf trained Cadillac service and relax in absolute luxury? It makes no sense.

The good guys at Ed Morse Cadillac Tampa have a new digital alignment tester all set up and ready to give you a FREE alignment check and printout. In less than 10 minutes you’ll know where you stand. And if you need tires, their prices will NOT be beat. Click on through below.

Strong interview below from longtime former NFL general manager Charley Casserly, now an analyst for NFL Network. Casserly was on WDAE-AM 620 this morning to talk all things Bucs, and he shared some interesting takes on the the replacement NFL officials.

Among other topics, Casserly talks about Lavonte David’s instinctive play and what the Bucs offense must do to beat the Giants. Click below to hear.

The leader of the New Schiano Order says he’s hands-off on playcalling

It was world famous popcorn-munching, coffee-slurping, fried-chicken-eating, oatmeal-loving, circle-jerking, beer-chugging Peter King, of Sports Illustrated and NBC Sports fame, who outed Greg Schiano as a pasta- and temperature-obsessed control freak on a national stage months ago. Yet yesterday, ironically it was King who set the stage for Schiano to explain that he enjoyed being hands-off head coach on gameday against the Panthers.

The leader of the New Schiano Order checked in on the Peter King Podcast and explained he never delegated all playcalling while leading Rutgers but is now content to be rather hands off with the Bucs.

“This job is really the first one as a head coach that in some way shape or form I’m not calling some part of the game,” Schiano said. “So it was  really different for me in that, you know, I contribute, and I’ll tell our coordinators if I want to do something, ‘Take a shot. Put pressure on them,’ but not having to make specific play calls allows you to really think about the game and the personnel and all those things. And that I really enjoyed. I didn’t think I would. But I did.”

Joe’s glad to hear Schiano is confident enough in his staff to take more of a CEO role and not micromanage the playcalling.

Perhaps King might even dare to publicly renounce the “control freak” label he was so quick to hit Schiano with. Nahh. That’s not going to happen.

The thing that jumped out at Joe in the win over the stinking Panthers was how much impact was made by the Bucs’ top three draft picks from this spring.

Safety Mark Barron put the fear of God in receivers young and old the way he popped people and broke up passes, not to mention the highlight reels he made on national sports shows by nearly beheading Steve Smith.

Muscle Hamster Doug Martin was everything advertised, getting tough yards fighting against the heralded Panthers linebacker unit, then closing the game out with a double-digit run for a first down.

Then there was weakside linebacker Lavonte David, who was playing sideline to sideline and was actually calling the defensive plays. A rookie in his first NFL game no less!

The feats of the three rookies were not lost on veteran sports columnist Gary Shelton, who waxed poetic about the trio in the Tampa Bay Times.

The kids are brand new. That should be pointed out, and re-pointed out. They are one game into their careers, and nothing is promised, and there is a lot of football to be played before any of them have arrived. All of us understand that.

And yet … weren’t all three of them something to see in their debuts?

Furthermore, isn’t it about time the Bucs discovered their next wave of sellable jerseys?

How good were the three Sunday? Martin led both teams in rushing yards, David led the Bucs in tackles and Barron led the Bucs in cracking the other team’s ribs. It was a beautiful thing.

Speaking of which, you just know the headline Joe chose is ample reason to drop a video on Joe’s readers from “The Who” when they were in their prime.

It is not a good thing to get former Bucs great defensive tackle Warren Sapp angry. And apparently, despite current Bucs defensive tackle Gerald McCoy having a fantastic game against the stinking Panthers, Sapp found a way to get irritated with GMC.

GMC hassled, hounded and bruised Panthers quarterback Cam Newton, who is the size of a tight end if not an offensive lineman. Newton, a couple of times, escaped the clutches of GMC which prompted Sapp — always a Bucs player at heart — to call GMC, so writes eye-RAH! Kaufman of the Tampa Tribune.

McCoy posted one of Tampa Bay’s three sacks against Cam Newton, adding two tackles for loss and two quarterback hits. On the morning after, he lamented a snap when he appeared to have Newton wrapped up but couldn’t bring him down – a sequence that prompted a phone call from former Bucs defensive tackle Warren Sapp.

“Sapp called me last night and said, ‘Look, if you’ve ever got a quarterback in your grasp like that and you let him out, me and you are going to fight,’ ” McCoy said.

Joe understands where Sapp is coming from and also understands Sapp has the same mentality of Al Davis, “The quarterback must go down, and he must go down hard.” But as GMC notes in Kaufman’s article, bringing down Newton is easier said than done. Newton is a different breed of cat than, say, Brett Favre or Rich Gannon or Jeff George, some of Sapp’s contemporaries.

Nevertheless, Joe thinks it is cool that Sapp is still so emotionally involved with the Bucs that it disturbs him when the Bucs don’t reach perfection.

It was one of the more fun moments of Sunday’s Bucs game, 2nd-and-10 on the Panthers 19 yard line with the Bucs leading 10-0 in the second quarter.

Josh Freeman completes a slant pass to Vincent Jackson, and Jackson is held up by Panthers defenders at the 7 yard line as Jackson keeps his legs pumping. Then Doug Martin sticks his head into the barely moving pile and tries to drive it, and then Jeremy Zuttah, Carl Nicks and Ted Larsen come flying in full sprint and collapse the pile to the 4 yard line — 1st-and-goal Bucs.

It was a great play, except for Dallas Clark standing alongside the pile out of danger while Martin and the O-line sacrificed their bodies. During the Raheem Morris era, that would have been classified as a “loaf.” Heck, in any era it was a loaf.

This disappointed Joe, especially after Bill Polian said over and over this offseason on NFL Radio that Clark is a guy who loves everything football and is the ultimate team player. Clark didn’t show it on that play.

Weeks ago Greg Schiano said changes to his depth chart would be worth noting.

Well, today there’s a new one. Brandon McDonald, the surprise nickel cornerback Sunday, has moved ahead of Myron Lewis and is listed as Eric Wright’s backup on the depth chart issued by the Bucs for their upcoming game against the Giants. Joe delivered an interview of McDonald yesterday, in case you missed it.

E.J. Biggers remains behind Aqib Talib, and Lewis, Anthony Gaitor and Leonard Johnson are listed as third string.

In past years, the NFL made it very easy to find and watch blacked out Bucs games on NFL.com. It was simple. All kinds of pop-up ads appeared on NFL.com to guide readers to the NFL Game Rewind broadcast starting at midnight following every blacked out game.

Well, that wasn’t the case yesterday. Those helpful pop-up ads never appeared, and the link wasn’t seen on the NFL Game Rewind page.

But Joe, thanks to a determined reader, is here to save the day. The FOX broadcast can be seen in glorious HD at http://gamerewind.nfl.com/buccaneers. Enjoy.

Bucs fans remember Chucky tapping his deep knowledge of the Raiders playbook and personnel and drilling the Bucs defense before the Bucs’ Super Bowl conquest, even quarterbacking the scout team himself to mimic Rich Gannon and prepare the Bucs for glory.

Can Mike Sullivan do the same this week?

Sullivan spent many years in the Giants organization and was Eli Manning’s prized quarterback coach last season. The Giants haven’t changed much — and why would they — and Sullivan should be a wealth of knowledge.

This is not lost on the leader of the New Schiano Order, who sat down for 10+ minutes today on The Blitz, hosted by Gannon and Adam Schein on SiriusXM NFL Radio.

Adam Schein: Is this a unique spot for you where you talk to your offensive coordinator first and foremost about maybe how to go after Eli Manning because of his intimate knowledge of Eli?

Greg Schiano: Well, I can’t lie. We’ve had several discussions. You know, you’d be a fool to do anything but. There’s nothing but the utmost respect. Mike Sullivan, our offensive coordinator, just thinks the world of Eli and really the entire Giants organization.  We know exactly what we’re up against. And that doesn’t mean we can do anything about it. Right? That’s our job. We gotta go out and play and coach. The flip side of that is they have a knowledge of Mike. And Mike’s calling the plays for us. So it’ll be interesting. There’ll be some subplots going on Sunday that are, you know, not in every game.

Joe hopes Sullivan can deliver that edge to the Bucs’ defense that tips the scales. Regardless, Sullivan’s biggest challenge remains in his playcalling duties. There’s little doubt the Bucs will need more than 16 points to bring home a W this weekend.

“This team is in a lot better shape this year. We’re locking in throughout the week a little bit better. I mean we’re doing a better job of locking in through walk-throughs and meeting rooms, you know, a lot better job getting ready for Sunday. I think last year we kind of tried to come out on Sunday and play the game. But this year we are playing the game Monday through Saturday, you know what I’m sayin?” — Aqib Talib, following Sunday’s Bucs-Panthers game.

Yes, Aqib, Joe knows what you’re sayin’.

It’s quotes like these that give Joe great hope for the 2012 season. Why? Because they lead Joe to believe the Bucs were a talented yet seriously undercoached team last season, one that should have produced more like the 2010 edition, rather than deal fans a historic tank job.

Last week was the first time the New Schiano Order Bucs prepared for a real game. Joe’s pleased that the differences from the old regime are still prominent.