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© St. Petersburg Times, published January 16, 2002
Tony Dungy
With all you have done, do you feel mistreated, underappreciated?
"Not at all. I think as a boss you have to make decisions. I've had to make decisions and I've made them and done what I think is best for the team, and my boss made a decision (about) what he thinks is best for the team. That's what you go by."
Were you surprised you were fired?
"I'd have to say I was a little surprised."
Can you describe how you explained it to your sons?
"I guess fortunately I didn't have to explain it to them. They can read and watch TV (laughter). I didn't have to explain too much. But they're going to be fine. It's tough. They have some good friends on the team. They've enjoyed it tremendously and they're a big part of what I do."
Will you take a year off?
"I don't know what I'm going to do. Look at all the options and see what happens. If I have a chance to do something else I'll investigate it. But I guess we'll just have to wait and see."
Do you have any regrets?
"No. I think it's easy to look back and second-guess and say we could've done this or could've done that. But over the course of six years you have a lot of decisions you have to make, and you think them through and you pray about them and you do what you think is best. And when you do that, I don't think you look back and say, well, we should've done this or that."
If you get another coaching job, would what you learned with the Bucs affect how you would coach that team?
"Well, I think you learn as you go, and I think I'm a better head coach now than I was six years ago, for sure. And that comes from experience and some things you just have to experience. I think I have grown from this."
What were the elements that led up to this decision?
JG: "What we do at the end of every season is, we sit down and look back at our season, and we look at the whole situation. ... You just look everything over and feel where we feel this franchise is going and what's in the best interests of this franchise, and at this point we just felt the best interests of this franchise was to go in a different direction. And again, it was a very, very difficult decision."
By what time frame would you like to have a new coach in place?
BG: "We're going to start the process this afternoon, and when it's done, it's done, and we're not going to say it's going to be done next Thursday and then you get mad at us for doing it on Tuesday. We're going to do the best we can, do it quickly as possible."
Q: Amid all the speculation during the playoff run, could it have been handled differently or better?
JG: "That's a tough situation because we kind of made the decision that we can't go chase (rumors). ... There was a big rumor last year at the Super Bowl about this franchise. So we said, okay, let's come out and let's try to address that rumor. Well, it didn't seem to kill that rumor. So after that point, we made a conscious decision, we can't chase these rumors. Because the first time you make a comment on a rumor and then you don't, everyone takes that as fact. ... There's still rumors circulating from last year which are not true, and we said they weren't true last year, but certain people still go on TV and talk about "imminent' and "It's going to happen' when it's not going to happen. So, how do you deal with it? We haven't figured that out yet."