Now He Won’t Tamper With Tampa Success

The guy who once had a hard time pinpointing Tampa in a U.S. atlas has helped put the defending Super Bowl champion Buccaneers on the map.

Tampa Bay General Manager Rich McKay, among the NFL’s most influential executives, has turned a franchise famous for its futility into one of the league’s consistent winners. The Buccaneers are the only team to have made the playoffs each of the last four seasons and now are angling to become the first team to repeat in the Super Bowl since the 1998 Denver Broncos.

McKay, son of legendary USC and Buccaneer coach John McKay, made it through the rough waters of the Bill Parcells scare, when it looked as though the Tuna was ready to take over as coach and fire him. McKay made it through a mini-feud with Jon Gruden too, when the young coach groused this off-season about not getting the free agents he wanted -- namely Emmitt Smith and Kyle Turley.

But McKay is not merely a survivor. He’s a Princeton-educated man with a distinct plan, one he thinks will keep the Buccaneers in the games-won column for years to come.

Question: Why are there no more NFL dynasties?

Answer: It’s the system. The system makes keeping yourself in the upper tier much more difficult. Because you can keep your core together -- and we have -- but you can’t keep the team together. There’s 53 guys, so maybe you can guarantee yourself 15 guys that you can keep. But after that, there’s no guarantees. That’s what has allowed the Ravens of the world to go from worst to first really quickly, and it’s made it harder on teams trying to stay at the top.

Q: So, you really couldn’t find Tampa on the map when your dad was hired as coach here?

A: My mom and I looked at the map. She came home and said, “I have the all-time secret for you. I think your dad’s going to take this pro job.”

Two years before that, he had turned down the New England job. He turned down the Cleveland job. He’d turned down the Ram job twice. So I was in shock.

She said, “I don’t know anything about Tampa.”

So we got out one of those old World Books, and I remember it seems like it took us five minutes -- I’m sure we’re not that stupid, it could have taken us only two or three -- but we could not find Tampa.

She said, “I know it’s down by Miami.” So we were looking on the East Coast.

Finally, she said, “Here it is! It’s on the other side!”

Q: You grew up in Southern California, played quarterback at Bishop Amat, lived with Pat Haden’s family for a while. Are you an L.A. guy at heart?

A: Yeah, I love L.A. The thing people don’t realize is, L.A. has everything. You can do anything you want. You can drive to Newport Beach, go down to San Diego, stay in L.A. and go to Hollywood. To me that was the neat thing.

Q: Malcolm Glazer has made an offer to buy the Dodgers, and there have been rumors that might entail selling the Buccaneers. At some level, that has to be a distraction to your players, doesn’t it?

A: It’s so far away, and our ownership has been so good from the standpoint of not interfering and not getting in the way, not being anything but a positive factor. Heck, what movie is going to be [shown] on the plane will be a bigger distraction than whether they buy the Dodgers. That’s not something that’s going to be on anybody’s mind.

Q: It’s been a crazy two years, what with the firing of Tony Dungy, the rumors Parcells was going to come in and fire you, the thought you might go to Atlanta to become GM there, Gruden, the Super Bowl. Do you feel like you’ve been through the wash, spin and dry cycles?

A: I’ve talked about this with my wife: I was spoiled. I was very fortunate to have come into an organization where we weren’t very good. There were no expectations on us. Then, as we got good, we also became very stabilized -- which is very atypical of the NFL. So when it got destabilized, it was a little different. I wasn’t accustomed to it. But if you’re in the NFL, you should be. You should be prepared for it, because it’s part of the game. The expectations are so high, and the demand to win is so now-driven, you just have to be able to roll with the punches wherever they fall.

Q: What do you make of the tension between you and Gruden this off-season? Nature of the business?

A: Yes, and I don’t blame coaches. Coaches want players, because the pressure we put on coaches today is unbelievably high and unrealistic. So, from a coach’s perspective, “Get me as many players as you can.”

In Jon’s case, he’s a guy that came in and there were a lot of expectations, a lot of picks traded for him, a lot written about him. He’s a guy that sets the bar very high. So I don’t blame him for that. I’d like to pick the forum a little differently. But it’s my job to say, “OK, this is how much money we have. This is where we’ve allocated it, and we cannot afford to do this, this and this. Because when we do, then we’ve got a problem.”

Q: If the Super Bowl is within reach, why not load up on talent?

A: You don’t want to bet on winning a Super Bowl. Because when you bet on winning a Super Bowl, I can assure you that you will lose. And when you lose, the consequences will be that you won’t even be allowed to bet next year, because you’ll have to dismantle and take some players out of the equation. You have to have a view toward long-term.

Q: But the 49ers won one that way in 1994 when they signed Deion Sanders, Ken Norton, Rickey Jackson, Gary Plummer, all those guys. What about them?

A: The Niners did it at the end of a run. And I give them credit because they decided at the end of the run to try to take one more shot. And it worked.

Now, it cost them a couple years. But what I thought the Niners did a good job of in those years was acknowledge that they weren’t going to be very good....

But what Dallas did is more typical of what happens. As you’re coming apart, you start saying to yourself, “Well, I’m not accepting 6-10. Let’s keep trying to add the older guy. Let’s keep trying to hang on.” And then you don’t have a plan to come back.

Q: Would you trade one Super Bowl ring for 15 winning seasons?

A: Would I rather be the Kansas City Chiefs or the St. Louis Rams? I would always take the Chiefs. They went to the playoffs every year, and they had a chance every year to win it. The Rams had something like eight consecutive losing seasons and then won a Super Bowl. I’ve been in a fan base where you lost year in and year out. That’s not fair to them. That takes all the fun out of the game. So I would rather be a consistent winner.