Jack Del Rio indicated he’s made decisions on his starting lineup where guard and safety have been up in the air, but isn’t ready to share them yet. The team’s newest unofficial depth chart includes no changes of note.

As for Thursday’s preseason finale against Atlanta, Del Rio said Maurice Jones-Drew won’t play, and that he’s unsure about his top linebackers, Daryl Smith, Kirk Morrison and Justin Durant, who didn’t play in Tampa Bay.

Some highlights of his press conference courtesy of the team’s public relations staff.

Will the linebackers play Thursday night?

“That’ll be a question we’ll have to answer as we go through the week. Short week, we’ll see where they are. I think they’re all approaching the time when they’ll be close and we just have to make a determination. Justin is further along than the other two, but we expect to have them all full speed coming out of the weekend. It’s just a matter of do we want to get some work with them or not? We’d like to get the work, but at the same time knowing that our opener is less than two weeks away, we just have to make a judgment after we gather more information during this week. But right now we’re just trying to do the best we can to heal up.”

You sound like a coach that thinks the risk [of playing guys now] isn’t worth it:

“There’s always a fine line. You want to work your guys, they need to be ready to go, they need to be playing at their best. That’s what you’re looking for, but you’re not at your best if you don’t have your best guys, so there’s that dilemma that coaches are faced with this time of year and we’ll just work through it the best we can. We’ve got to trust the trainers and the doctors to help us along in that decision-making and then ultimately we make a choice and then we’ll live with it and not look back, but at this point we’re still kind of gathering information. We want to make a good, sound decision. I’d like our guys, I’d like them all to be playing right now, I’d like them all to be practicing right now. We think it’s important, that’s why we do it, but where we can get a guy and actually have him for the year, have him healthy and put this behind us as we start the year, we’d like to do that.”

With Maurice Jones-Drew only having six carries in the preseason, does it give you confidence he’ll be in enough game shape for the regular season:

“Well, I think in terms of ideal scenarios you’d like to have a little more active work going into it. I think for us, much like we were talking about when we were speaking on the linebacker situation and whether you play them or not, I think right now he’s clearly one of our marquee players. I think arriving to the regular season with him at full strength ready to take his turn, I think that’s most important rather than trying to decide whether or not he’s going to be able to carry it 30 or 35 times. And we’ll work through that when we get there, but right now we want to get him to the regular season as fit, healthy and conditioned as we can to begin the year that way.”