Sep 09, 2009 - Byron Leftwich has made three previous opening-day starts in the National Football League. On each occasion – 2004-06, all in Jacksonville – he was the incumbent starting quarterback, having finished the previous season at the helm of the Jaguars' offense.

Each of those opening days also featured a very familiar supporting cast, with the likes of Fred Taylor, Jimmy Smith, Reggie Williams and Kyle Brady around for most of that time. The head coach, Jack Del Rio, was the same each year. There was one offensive coordinator switch in the middle, from Bill Musgrave to Carl Smith in 2005, but Leftwich and the Jags crew had the entire offseason to make the transition.

After a two-year hiatus, Leftwich is back in an opening-day starting lineup, this time with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. The former 2003 first-round pick signed with the Buccaneers in mid-April and spent the next four-and-a-half months battling for the starting job with Luke McCown and rookie Josh Freeman, a competition he won. Leftwich has had plenty of time to immerse himself in Tampa Bay's playbook and build connections with the team's skill-position players. There's no doubt he's in a comfort zone as he prepares to lead the Bucs into their opener against the Dallas Cowboys on Sunday.

Still, this situation is nothing like the familiar surroundings in which he made his last three opening-day starts. He has a whole new cast of teammates; or rather, he's the new teammate. The head coach is in his first year on the job. The Bucs have spent the offseason installing a significantly different offensive attack. Several of his key weapons, including Kellen Winslow and Derrick Ward, were in different uniforms last season. And roughly a week before the season was to begin, the team said goodbye to Offensive Coordinator Jeff Jagodzinski and elevated Leftwich's position coach, Greg Olson, to that role.

That's a lot to process, no? To Leftwich, it's all a matter of concentrating on the Xs and Os.

"As a player in this league, you're taught to go play and that's what I'm going to do," he said in the middle of the Bucs' week of preparation for the Cowboys. "I'll go out there and play. We're professionals. We're able to deal with a lot more than you guys give us credit for. In this timeframe, things always happen around the league on every team, because everybody knows we're down to the last cuts. So you kind of prepare yourself for something to happen. I'll say none of us was prepared for [the coordinator switch], but we're professionals, we'll handle it like men and we'll move on."

Had the Bucs charted a whole new offensive course with their coaching change, Leftwich might have had to work harder to project a lack of concern. In this case, however, there was very little disruption to how the quarterback and his offensive mates have to prepare for the games ahead. The playbook is intact, as are the offensive's underlying philosophies. Leftwich said that Olson definitely puts a different spin on the playbook than Jagodzinski, but it's just a matter of what is called and when, not what can be called.

"We changed some things, but at the same time we haven't really changed a lot," said Leftwich. "It's not like we're going in and putting a new whole complete system in in a week. We're not trying to do that. We have a system in place; we have a different guy just calling the system. Different ideas, different formations here and there…so there are differences, but we won't be learning a complete new offense in a week. But there will be some new wrinkles added in."

If anything, the change is probably more comfortable for Leftwich and fellow quarterbacks Freeman and Josh Johnson because the man now in charge is somebody they've spent a lot of time with over the last five months. Leftwich has become accustomed to Olson's style of leadership, and he can see how it will apply to the offense as a whole.

"I like him a lot from the standpoint that I believe he'll keep that aggressive mindset as an offense," said Leftwich. "He loves when you play aggressively at the quarterback position, but he also wants you to play smart. He challenges you as a quarterback. He puts you in tough situations to see how you react and what response you come up with. That's the thing I like about Olie – you're always stimulated, even in practice. You're always thinking, you're always going. Then on Sunday, when those things happen, you're prepared for anything."

Olson helped Leftwich prepare very well for the start of training camp on August 1. After naming Leftwich the starter, Head Coach Raheem Morris revealed that Leftwich had entered camp ahead in the competition, though McCown performed well enough in the ensuing weeks to close the gap. That left the preseason games as the final, valuable bits of evidence in the decision-making process. Leftwich showed a fine grasp of the offense and an ability to push the ball downfield, and he secured the job.

What he didn't do was throw any passes to top wideout Antonio Bryant, who missed the entire preseason slate after undergoing arthroscopic knee surgery. Leftwich did complete a pair of passes to Michael Clayton in the Bucs' Week Two win at Jacksonville, but that was the only game in which Clayton appeared thanks to a mild hamstring strain.

Bryant and Clayton are ready to go for the regular-season opener, as was the plan, and Leftwich said their lack of playing time together in August was not an issue.

"No concern," said the quarterback. "I had a chance to throw to these guys all summer. Being here this summer and going through the OTAs and everything, it gets me to a point where I have no concerns over that."

And it's doubtful Morris would be sympathetic if Leftwich was concerned over the matter.

"You talk about 'no excuses,'" said Morris. "That's not an excuse for us, that's not valuable. To be honest with you, Dallas doesn't care if they threw a pass to each other or not. They've got to go do it. In order to win this game, you've got to give yourself an opportunity. You've got to go do it for the first time when live bullets are being shot and you've got to go deal."

Leftwich isn't looking for excuses, no matter how different this year's opening-day start is from his days in Jacksonville. He's just glad to be back in a position where such things could matter.

"It's a feeling that as a kid growing up you always wanted," said Leftwich of opening an NFL season as a starting quarterback. "When you get to this level, you always want it. You always want that feeling to be going out there Week One. It's a special feeling, I believe, for everybody. You can see everybody kind of perked up this week in the meetings, making sure they don't miss anything. That's the great thing about the NFL."