The fact that Da’Quan Bowers has been able to come back from his Achilles injury this spring to make his first appearance not quite midway through the season is exceptional.

As a result, Bucs coaches have sort of been treating Bowers with kid gloves, slowly working him into the lineup more and more. Part of this is to get Bowers into football shape since he missed all of training camp and preseason.

The kid gloves started to come off a little last Sunday. Already down a defensive end with Adrian Clayborn out for the season, Michael Bennett was dinged up in the win over the Raiders and suddenly, Bowers was logging a lot more playing time than he or his coaches planned.

Bowers told Joe that his conditioning was far from his train of thought when Bennett went down.

“You never think about anything like that until you are put in the moment,” Bowers said. “My well-being definitely wasn’t my first thought. My first thought was: ‘Michael is down. I have to help the team.’

“That was my first initial thought. Once I got into it, I wasn’t paying attention to how many plays I got.

“My Achilles isn’t the issue now, it’s my conditioning. But as you can tell, going 9 to 10 plays in a row, my conditioning isn’t much of an issue any more.”

This is good news to Joe, and should be to all Bucs fans. The more Bowers can play — and apparently, he can play more — the less wear and tear on Bennett.

The more Bennett and Bowers can rotate the fresher those guys will be down the road. Bennett hasn’t rotated out much this season so giving him a few breathers will be welcome for the soon-to-be-free agent.