The Tampa Bay Buccaneers have planned to honor Ronde Barber at their Sept. 9 season-opening game. The Bucs expect Barber to make his 200th straight start in that contest. NFL.com write Gregg Rosenthal just hopes the team isn’t jinxing Barber.

Assuming Barber does start the game, the big question becomes at which position. The Buccaneers moved Barber to a starting safety role this spring due to depth issues there and they would like to keep him in that spot, but the Tampa Tribune’s Ira Kaufman speculates that Eric Wright’s recent arrest could send Barber back to corner early in the season.

Regardless, Barber deserves some recognition from UVa and NFL fans as one of the best players to ever come out of the Virginia program. The five-time Pro Bowler has recorded 43 career interceptions and 27 career sacks, the only player in NFL history to reach that 40-25 milestone. He has posted 1,337 tackles in his career (second in Tampa Bay history). He also has scored 11 touchdowns on defensive take-aways, a number that puts him fifth in NFL history. As for the 199 consecutive starts to date, that’s the longest by any cornerback in league history and his 224 consecutive games played ties him for the second-longest streak for a defensive player since 1970.

Hoo-Tube Video Of The Day

The Afternoon Break includes a daily video. This Friday, the 2012 Olympics open in London so this week The Afternoon Break is featuring Dawn Staley in the video section. Staley, who was inducted into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame in early June, is a three-time Olympic gold medalist (1996, 2000, 2004) and she carried the flag for the USA in the opening ceremony for the 2004 Olympics.

Break Links

• Poster chicken made his second round post for football season predictions here. Other football board topics include Richmond’s team, UVa’s offense, and excitement for the season.
• The EDGE board has threads on Luke Bowanko and Tony Covington.
• The Corner variety pack: Hoos in the Olympics, chicken salad, potential relocation, Twitter, and Top of the Hops in Charlottesville.

Daily Retweet

This portion of the break looks at TheSabre.com’s favorite Twitter retweet of the day. Follow @thesabre.

Today’s retweet is from Ken Clausen ‏(follow @KClausen27), former Virginia lacrosse player. He’s congratulating former Cavalier teammate Adam Ghitelman on his new role at Harvard (read more here).

‏@KClausen27: Congrats to my man @aghitelman8 on his promotion to Assistant Coach at Harvard. Harvard’s got a keeper!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 24th, 2012 at 1:28 pm and is filed under The Good Ol Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.