Tampa Bay Buccaneers practice in Miami and talk about Hurricane Ian impact; Minneapolis selected as contingency site for Sunday's game

By Ben Morse, Wayne Sterling and David Close, CNN

Updated 0834 GMT (1634 HKT) September 29, 2022

The Tampa Bay Buccaneers practice at the Miami Dolphins' facility.

(CNN)The Tampa Bay Buccaneers practiced for the first time in Miami on Wednesday having relocated to south Florida as Hurricane Ian made landfall.

The team moved their football operations to Miami this week because of the impact Ian could have. It made landfall along the southwestern coast of Florida near Cayo Costa as a powerful Category 4 storm on Wednesday, but has now weakened to a Category 1 storm. It's one of the strongest hurricanes to make landfall on the west coast of the Florida peninsula.After practicing at the Miami Dolphins facility in Miami Gardens for the first time — the Dolphins traveled to Cincinnati where they will face the Bengals on Thursday — Bucs players and coaching staff spoke about the effect the storm has had on them and on their families. «First of all, our thoughts and hearts go out to everybody in Tampa that's still there, hoping that they recover well and it doesn't hit them very hard,» head coach Todd Bowles told the media. «That's the biggest thing. What we do is really small entertainment for people that go through a lot of rough things, and hopefully we can provide that. »It's bigger than just a football team, number one. Number two, it's just making sure the players' families are safe and the coaches' families are safe and everybody on the staff is safe so they can concentrate on football. So we brought a lot of them down here. Everybody that wanted to come could come, family-wise and otherwise, including pets. We're going to make sure those people are fine first because you really can't concentrate on football without