Let's look at the glass together and you tell me whether it looks half full or empty. What do the Browns, Bengals, Panthers and 49ers have in common besides accounting for half of the Bucs' victories this year? All the head coaches should be updating their resumes. Three more victories (Rams, Seahawks and Cardinals) are from the NFC West, the worst division in professional football sports. One is from the (6-10) Redskins, a team with a hundred million dollar paperweight (Haynesworth) and a sleep-inducing quarterback controversy (if you can call McNabb-Grossman a controversy). The last game was against the Saints, a team that quit (gasp!). Yeah, I said it. They quit. What, you think they put in Chase Daniels under center because they wanted to win?
Want half full? Read every other online newspaper in the area. Plenty of Buc love to go around and I'm not necessarily here to disagree with any of it. I'm here for the skeptical fan who simply isn't ready to give up their delicate flower with the current circumstantial evidence we have to go on. The fans have taken it on the chin all year from the local media for the blackouts and I'm here to defend you. I've never seen a more apologetic press than I have this year.
We lost to teams with winning records.
But we almost beat them.
Okay, well then we almost lost to the Browns, Bengals, Rams and Cardinals.
Hey, a win is a win.
We lost to Detroit at home.
That's not the same Detroit team.
You can't win, Bucs fans. They bashed you for not going to the stadium even when the Bucs were winning. But if you did start filling the stadium, they would have called you fair-weather.
This article appears in Dec 30, 2010 – Jan 5, 2011.