Dungy Has Surprising Buccaneers on Course for Making Playoffs

Tony Dungy rested well during the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ bye week.

His team is 5-2, owns a share of first place in the NFC Central and--despite a two-game losing streak--has peace of mind that it’s in a good position to make the playoffs for the first time since 1982.

Ticket sales are rising, and so is confidence in Dungy’s brand of low-key leadership, which was drawn into question when the Bucs began last season with five consecutive losses and were 1-8 before turning themselves around.

Tampa Bay’s next victory will match its total for 1996, Dungy’s first year as a head coach. The mood of the team in the wake of back-to-back losses to Green Bay and Detroit remains upbeat.

“You always feel badly when you lose,” Dungy said. “But looking at it, going into this bye, we’re 5-2 and tied for first place, where the last bye we were 0-5 and really out of the whole playoff picture. But you still have to keep things in perspective. There’s a lot of football left to be played.”

A surprising two-game lead over the Packers and Minnesota Vikings evaporated the past two weeks. However, Dungy is confident the Bucs will regroup and put together a strong stretch run.

Three of Tampa Bay’s remaining nine games are against winless opponents, and the combined record of the teams left on the schedule is 24-36. Four of those dates are at home, where Tampa Bay had won eight straight before last Sunday’s 27-9 loss to the Lions.

The team’s success has become infectious, spreading through a community that’s endured five coaching changes and 14 consecutive losing seasons since the Bucs last earned a playoff berth.

Fans have embraced new team colors of red, pewter and black (replacing orange and white) and also like the bolder image projected by the club logo bearing a skull over crossed swords instead of the plumed, winking pirate that many considered an embarrassment.

Nothing, however, has changed the attitude of people as much as winning. Dungy is a solid, though distant, second reason after weathering last season’s shaky start to lead Tampa Bay’s resurgence.

“You can’t take anything personally in this business. Your fans want you to win. They’re frustrated, and certainly here had every reason to be frustrated, having not won in so long,” he said.

“I never really got discouraged. I just felt like with my Christian faith we were here for a reason, and the Lord brought us here. He was showing us the adversity and testing us, and now he’s testing us with a little success. You have to learn how to deal with both of them.”

Dungy, 42, built a reputation as one of the NFL’s bright young assistants in 15 years as a defensive coach with the Vikings, Pittsburgh Steelers and Kansas City Chiefs, yet he repeatedly was passed over for head coaching positions.

The rap on him was he supposedly was too young, or maybe even too nice, to command the respect of players more likely to respond to the discipline of a coach with a fiery personality.

When Sam Wyche was fired after the 1995 season, Tampa Bay courted Jimmy Johnson and Steve Spurrier before turning to Dungy, whose even temperament has turned out to be a perfect fit for the Bucs.

“He just kept rising on the charts and really was kind of an obvious choice at the end,” general manager Rich McKay said. “It was really kind of that thought of ‘why isn’t he a head coach in this league? He should be.’ ”

To eliminate questions about how Dungy would be perceived in the locker room, the Bucs contacted general managers and coaches he’d worked for, as well as some of his former players.

“They all, to a man, put leadership as a strong quality and were quick to say not to buy into that thing that Tony is not a yeller and a screamer,” McKay said. “They were quick to say: ‘That’s irrelevant. He’s a leader.’ I can’t remember a bad recommendation he got.”

Dungy insists if he had finished his career without getting an opportunity to be a head coach, it wouldn’t have bothered him nearly as much as most people think.

He enjoyed the years he spent under Chuck Noll with the Steelers, Marty Schottenheimer with the Chiefs and Dennis Green with the Vikings, and has drawn from the philosophies of each of his ex-bosses.

“I worked for a lot of good guys and learned a lot in the time that I was working,” he said. “I just think this was the right time and the right place.”

The Bucs equaled the fastest start in franchise history by winning their first five games this season, joining the 1956 Lions as the only teams in NFL history to begin 5-0 after opening with five consecutive losses the previous year.

Dungy credits Noll for instilling the resolve to stick with a plan he was confident would work if the players remained committed to making it successful.

“All you can do is give your sales pitch, and the players have to believe you or not,” the coach said.

“The one thing we didn’t do was change. We didn’t after we lost three games say: ‘Well, this wasn’t really very good. This is the real plan we had. That was just a fake plan.’ We said: ‘Hey, this is what we’re going to do, and it’s going to work. We’re not going to change players. We’re not going to go out and make wholesale changes. I think the players appreciated that.”