Dennis Allen: Spencer Rattler did some good things, we didn’t do enough around him

The biggest story in Sunday’s game between the Buccaneers and Saints was that the Buccaneers scored 27 straight points in the second half and went from trailing 27-24 to winning 51-24.

Head coach Dennis Allen called the defensive performance unacceptable in his postgame press conference and found it difficult to focus on anything other than the 594 yards the Bucs accumulated on their way to victory. However, the game also featured quarterback Spencer Rattler’s first NFL start, and Allen also spent some time talking about the rookie’s performance.

Rattler was 22 of 40 for 243 yards, one touchdown and two interceptions while being sacked five times during the loss. The first half was better than the second as the Bucs’ offensive fire allowed the defense to pick off the rookie, something Allen noted in his assessment.

“Overall, I think he did some good things,” Allen said in a team transcript. “There were some encouraging things, some things he’ll learn from, from a failure perspective on his part. I don’t think we did enough around him to help him. It was difficult for us to keep the football going. I thought they really won the inside part of the line of scrimmage, probably really on both sides of the ball on the line of scrimmage. I thought he did some things really well early in the game, especially in the first half. In the second half things continued somehow. I thought they started putting a little more pressure on him. We weren’t able to defend as well, which made it a little more difficult for him.”

Allen said he intends to keep Rattler on Thursday night against the Broncos and will spend the next few days trying to find a better team effort around him.