Only lining on season is velvet

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© St. Petersburg Times,
published November 19, 2001

TAMPA -- Ladies and gentlemen, start your eulogies.

Talk of a season that died young. Talk of wasted promise and unrealized goals. Talk of the days that could have been.

The Bucs' season died Sunday following a lengthy illness.

It was nine games old.

A tragedy, really. For a moment it appeared the Bucs were going to beat this lifelessness that had plagued their season. Then a ball smacked a goalpost and thudded to earth like the team that kicked it. It spun and stopped, lying there without points, without pulse. If you did not know better, you'd swear it had settled on ashes and dust.

It is over. Who leads the Bucs back from here? Lazarus?

After Sunday's loss to the Chicago Bears, they are 4-5, and doing absolutely nothing particularly well. The machine is flatlining. The doctors have done all they can do.

Oh, the Bucs, stubborn patients that they are, insist they live on. Forget the priests at the bedside, forget the coffin salesmen in the lobby. The players point out, as they have every other week this season, that they could start to get on a roll at any second. But when? The Bucs haven't won two games in a row since December.

Do you see signs of life anywhere? You look at the Bucs offense, and you watch for a finger to twitch. It doesn't. You put a mirror under the nose of the Bucs defense and check to see if it fogs. It doesn't. They just lie there. Better to bury them than to praise them.

The Bucs are now nine weeks into what will be remembered as the most disappointing season of their history, and things don't look any better than they did at the outset. They cannot block, cannot run, cannot trade their field goals for touchdowns. They neither throw the ball deep nor stop the other team from doing so. They are not particularly hard on opposing quarterbacks anymore.

And now, with a game on the line, they cannot even manage not to fake a punt.

For the Bucs, this about sums up the season. With 9:37 to play and trailing by eight points, the Bucs had an option to fake a punt if they got a certain look from the Bears. They didn't, and everyone on the team knew that Mark Royals was supposed to punt the ball. Everyone but Royals, who didn't get his hand signal from Aaron Stecker. It was a nice bit of self-deception that handed the Bears what turned out to be the winning field goal. There was so much to be salvaged for the Bucs. Had they won this game, they would have been within a game of the NFC Central lead. Instead, they fell apart. They turned Jim Miller into the Mad Bomber and Marty Booker into Jerry Rice.

Say what you wish about the Bears, the Miracles of the Midway. Yes, they are playing wildly, wonderfully over their heads. But isn't it nice to see that someone is?

There is a certain familiarity to these Bears. They remind you of the Bucs of '97 or so, back when reputations were still something to be earned, not rested upon. They fight and scratch and hustle and believe. They do all the little things that make winning possible. At last report, they don't have spats with their own rookies over the use of cell phones in the locker room. They seem to have that spark, that edge that the Bucs lost somewhere along the way.

Never has there been a Bucs team that has done so little with so much. Watch them play, and it is hard to figure how any of us saw them going deep into the playoffs. They simply don't do anything well enough to strike fear into an opponent. They seem destined to be remembered as a warning against lofty expectations.

You hear a lot about dead men walking, but history says they usually do not reach the playoffs.

"I don't feel dead," Bucs safety John Lynch said. "I might be foolish for thinking this way, but this is a tough league. There is a lot of football to be played. I'm not going to stop fighting."

"We have to play like madmen," defensive tackle Warren Sapp said. "We have to run the table."

It's hard to blame players for feeling that way. How else are players supposed to feel? But haven't we heard all of that before? Weren't their backs to the wall and the guns to their head long before this? If the turnaround didn't start with this must win, what is to make us believe it will start with the next one?

"It's tough," Keyshawn Johnson said. "That's not to say the season is over, so don't write that I said the season is over. It's not over. There are seven games left. It's a very tough season, and at the same time, it can look like very slim to none as far as making the playoffs."

What do the Bucs need? Not much. They need to win six out of seven. They need the return of their defensive relentlessness. They need to cure their running game. They need to be focused, efficient, creative. They need this season to turn into one of those where you are checking the math on the final day to see if somehow they have qualified for new life.

In other words, they need to be resurrected. Just that.

In the meantime, wear black. They are the dearly departed, and we can only wonder what might have been.

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