Green Bay Packers: Vita Vea is Back for Bucs but Antonio Brown is Out

It’s the Friday before game day, and that means we start learning about injury designations for the upcoming matchup. When it comes to the Green Bay Packers, they are a relatively healthy team for this time of the year. Every player listed on the injury report has practiced to some extent this week, although we did recently learn that Kevin King did miss Friday’s practice with a “back issue,” as Matt LaFleur called it.

So, for now, we wait and see what injury designations each player has heading into the NFC Championship. In addition to King, two other names to keep your eyes on include Kingsley Keke, who missed last week’s game with a concussion, and AJ Dillon, who left Sunday’s game with a quad injury. But as I said, both have practiced this week.

When it comes to the Buccaneers, they received some good news and some not so good news on Friday. We would first learn from Head Coach Bruce Arians that the Bucs will be without Antonio Brown this weekend after he exited last Sunday’s game with a knee injury.

Brown is one of the many weapons that Tom Brady has in this Tampa offense. Including the playoffs, he has appeared in 10 games with the Bucs this season and hauled in 48 of his 68 targets for a completion rate of nearly 71 percent. He also totaled 542 receiving yards at 11.3 yards per catch with five touchdowns, and Brady has a passer rating of 112.5 when targeting him.

Brown has been a favorite target of Brady’s on the short and underneath routes, with a bulk of his targets coming within 10 yards of the line of scrimmage but distributed to all areas of the field.

Now the good news that the Bucs received was that Vita Vea has been activated off IR and will be available for Sunday’s game. Vea has been on IR since Week 5 with a fractured ankle.

This is potentially a big boost for an already stout Buccaneers’ interior defensive front. Prior to his injury, Vea had totaled 16 pressures, two sacks, and nine run-stops in only five games. Although he has a much smaller sample size given his injury, Vea’s overall grade of 90.3 from Pro Football Focus ($) is the third-best among all interior defensive linemen.

At 6’4″ – 347 pounds, Vea is a special player who can make an impact in both the running and the passing games. However, it’s worth noting that we don’t know how much he will play or how effective he will be after missing that much time.

The final injury reports for both teams will be released in a matter of hours, but we know at this point that the Buccaneers’ offense will be without Antonio Brown, while the defense received a potentially big boost with the return of Vita Vea.