Buccaneers Will Need to Get Offensive

Justifiably, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers are known nationally as one of the top two or three teams in pro football.

Their personnel warrants that description and, on defense, their coaching staff has earned it.

So the next question is whether, on offense, the Buccaneers will again try to play outdated 1960s football at Washington today in one of the new century’s games of the week.

The Redskins aren’t very good this year, but they can overhaul any opponent that won’t play modern offense.

That, conspicuously, is Tampa Bay, whose coaches let the New York Jets hang around last Sunday until the breaks and the momentum changed in the fourth quarter.

And that’s how the Jets pulled it out, 21-17.

A solid football club potentially, the Buccaneers made too many mistakes to win.

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SIT ON LEAD: For 1960s coaches and for others who came along later, the offensive goal was to balance yardage gained passing and running; and under Coach Tony Dungy, the Buccaneers brilliantly met that old test in the Jet game, passing for 120 yards and running for 119.

But the 2000 problem is different.

Most teams have the firepower now to win in the end if you don’t put them away, if, that is, you try to sit on a lead that’s only 17-6, say, in the fourth quarter.

That was the score in the final minutes Sunday when the Jets, who had been just hanging around, were suddenly in the game, needing only a short touchdown pass, then a Buccaneer fumble, and then a surprise halfback pass to stun an NFL power.

Earlier that day, to enlarge Tampa’s slim lead, a halfback pass was an example of exactly what Dungy could have called himself but didn’t.

Beyond doubt, Dungy ranks first in the league as a defensive coach, but as an offensive strategist he can hardly find his way out to the 50-yard line.

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KEYSHAWN GROUNDED: There are better offensive players than Tampa Bay’s in the league this season, but the Buccaneers are good enough with quarterback Shaun King, receivers Keyshawn Johnson and Jacquez Green, runners Warrick Dunn and Mike Alstott, and their blocking line.

They lost to the outmanned Jets because, on Dungy’s orders, they handed off to their good running backs over and over and over--controlling the ball and the game for more than three quarters with 32 running plays on a day when King attempted but 19 passes.

Dungy is a coach whose idea of passing is to pass primarily on passing downs, such as third and five, when the pass rush is toughest.

For ANY passer, that’s the hard way.

In the 1960s, Vince Lombardi’s Green Bay players often won with such football, but in 2000 it is both unnerving and unnecessary to hope that 17 points will stand up in the fourth quarter against an undefeated opponent like the Jets.

If in the first three quarters the Buccaneers had thrown first-down passes even half the time--instead of repeatedly calling on Alstott--they would have won, surely, with King and Keyshawn, who are, clearly, good enough.

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CONSERVATIVE PROBLEM: Fumbles hurt conservative coaches the most because such coaches place a needless extra burden on their players not to fumble or throw interceptions--the kind of misplays that the high-scoring, undefeated Rams surmount all the time.

And it was fumble plays, two of them, that beat two of the NFL’s most reactionary coaches last Sunday, Dungy and Atlanta’s Dan Reeves.

The Rams are in position to win their fifth straight against San Diego today because on the turning-point play of last week’s game, Falcon running back Jamal Anderson, going in for the go-ahead touchdown in the third quarter, fumbled five yards short.

Ram safety Keith Lyle picked up the fumbled ball there and raced it 94 yards the other way for a 24-13 lead that became 41-20 in the final accounting.

Was Anderson’s game-deciding fumble just another turnover--as NFL coaches invariably term such a play?

Not quite.

There’s a reason it happened--in fact, there are two good reasons:

o On first and goal that time at the Ram five-yard line, Reeves called an ultra-conservative power run for Anderson on the mistaken assumption that football is a game of blocking and tackling and hammering the opposing team with such runs.

o The St. Louis coaches know Reeves is that way, so they were ready for precisely that play.

As Anderson bucked forward, the Rams met him with what was virtually an 11- man line, leaving no place for him to run, and easily wrestling him down with conventional defensive techniques that include, in today’s football, multiple efforts to strip the ball away.

The 94-yard fumble return was a predictable play that was just waiting to happen.

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WARNER UNFLAPPABLE: The offensive team scored last Sunday’s three other long-range Ram touchdowns in Atlanta on pass plays initiated by quarterback Kurt Warner and finished off by wide receivers Isaac Bruce (66 yards) and Torry Holt (80 and 85 yards).

All season, the Rams have been, in entertainment terms, the NFL’s fun team; but in the Atlanta game, they exceeded every prior effort with the four touchdowns that destroyed their determined opponents for, in order, 80, 94, 66, and 85 yards.

Warner’s play on Holt’s first (80-yard) touchdown in the second quarter may have been his finest ever.

Assaulted by high-spirited Atlanta blitzers--who were typical of all teams attempting to knock down world champions this year or any year----the Ram passer surmised that Holt was being single-covered at the critical moment by veteran Falcon cornerback Ashley Ambrose.

Warner couldn’t see Holt and Ambrose over the blitzers, but he knew the game plan; and as he fell heavily toward the ground, he let the pass go at the final instant.

Ambrose, noticing that Warner was in big trouble, anticipated the kind of weak throw that would have come from almost anybody else in the league, past or present, in that predicament.

So as the pocket caved in on the Ram quarterback, who immediately disappeared under a pile of Falcons, Ambrose hustled forward to intercept the expected dying duck just as Warner’s unexpectedly strong throw sailed over his head to Holt, who made a sure-handed reaching catch, then led a long parade to the end zone.

The combination of passing accuracy, toughness, and unflappable demeanor that distinguish Warner have seldom been so plainly shown.

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RAMS UNIQUE: The St. Louis team’s two other long touchdown plays last Sunday looked easier but in fact came harder, springing out of the mind of Ram Coach Mike Martz, the team’s signal-caller who is probably the NFL’s leading offensive philosopher of all-time.

Most critics attempt to tie Martz’s offensive approach to that of the coaches he’s worked for over the years--Joe Gibbs among them--but the truth is that the Ram leader is his own man and, besides, one of a kind.

A South Dakota-born 1973 summa cum laude graduate of Fresno State, Martz, who gets by mainly on his brains, is a passing enthusiast of an order never before seen, even in the respective heydays of Clark Shaughnessy, Sid Gillman and Bill Walsh.

As a head coach, Denver’s Mike Shanahan, whose last two seasons have been severely harmed by injuries to his best players, doubtless could give lessons to Martz--but as an offensive thinker, nobody could.

For one instance, early in the fourth quarter at Atlanta, Martz appeared to be losing his grip when on successive calls he demanded running plays at a time when the game was still on the line, the Rams better by only 27-13.

Through that series of plays, the Rams were apparently sitting on their lead until their coach finally went to Warner’s arm--but only when it was third and 17.

With obvious joy, the Falcons sacked him.

On their next series, the Rams also ran, uncharacteristically, on first and second down; but on third and seven at their own 15-yard line--just when it seemed that Martz was depending on Marshall Faulk’s running plays to hold that 14-point lead--the coach called the play he had been setting up all along: a quick short pass that Warner and Holt translated into an 85-yard touchdown.

Now it was 34-13, Rams, and after Atlanta closed it to 14 points again, 34- 20, Warner’s coach was ready with another surprise.

Because their offense had lately been running the ball so steadily--by design--they came with a fake run out of running-play-action, a staple elsewhere but a Martz rarity.

Thus, no rushers were in sight as the Falcons focused on the Ram ballcarrier while Warner threw his fourth touchdown pass of the game to Bruce, who, 66 yards later, turned it into the final score, 41-20.

In other words, the Rams’ series of touchdown bombs didn’t just happen.

They were carefully planned, and obviously expected by every Ram.

A major difference between Martz and others in football, past and present, is worth noting.

Whereas it has been standard procedure for passing coaches to run the ball in the fourth quarter--after getting a first-half lead with Joe Montana’s arm, say, or Steve Young’s--Martz keeps throwing the ball.

On every call he makes, the Rams are either passing or setting up a pass play.

And that has kept him and the Rams on top for the last 20 regular-season weeks in the NFL, last year and this, to say nothing of the playoffs last winter.

Martz’s quarterback, Warner, is unusual if not unique, true, but if you watched this club in the 1999 exhibition season, when Martz deployed his handpicked then-quarterback, Trent Green--until Green was injured--you saw just what you’re seeing now from Warner.

Thus it’s hard for Green’s fans to believe that Warner is better than he.

Ram fans keep thinking, indeed, that Martz could do it with any good quarterback--just as the 49ers could have done it in the 1980s with Montana, Young, Terry Bradshaw or any other good passer who was willing to listen to Walsh.

Although, as a passer, Warner does seem better than most of his peers and predecessors, if not all of them, a final assessment awaits the end of his career and his coach’s career.