Quiet Strength (15 page)

When I was in Minnesota, we knew that if we could get the Bucs down early, they would give up, and we could win easily. But if they started well, they would be competitive with us to the end. It seemed that the team had cultivated a fragile mind-set that had infected their play for years. They always expected something to go wrong, and it usually did.

When I arrived in Tampa, I began meeting with the players who lived there, trying to understand from them what needed to be fixed. Although all the issues were relatively minor, they contributed to the team’s second-class, defeatist, excuse-laden mentality. I began to sell the philosophy that we are responsible for what happens to us, not anyone or anything else.

No excuses, no explanations.

At the same time, I started to address some of the issues the players were bringing to my attention. I realized that by addressing minor issues we could bring about a major culture shift. The Bucs’ previous owner had been known for his frugality, and in order to save a few dollars, the team often stayed in inconvenient locations when they were on the road. When I came on board, we began to stay downtown at Marriotts, Wyndhams, and Ritz-Carltons. It was a small change but part of a bigger shift I wanted us to make.

The players also complained that they were often treated with a lack of respect. For example, the equipment manager was very concerned about the cost of replacing lost towels. He felt that players might be tempted to take towels home to wash their cars or dogs or whatever. He was right—the cost of towels certainly can add up. But his solution was to assign each guy a towel with his name attached to it by a clothespin. This way, he could inventory the towels and know who had taken one. We told the guys we were going to treat them like adults and leave the towels out in a stack. If they could not be trusted with the towels, we would go back to assigning one towel per player. As time went on, we never needed to do that. It was another small change but part of a bigger cultural shift.

One of the things I couldn’t change was the location of our training camp at the University of Tampa. The University of Tampa had been founded more than sixty years earlier in a hotel Henry Plant had built in the late 1800s along the banks of the Hillsborough River. Originally intended as a getaway for vacationing northerners, it has since been turned into a very pretty school. As a training camp, however, it had seen too many lousy Bucs teams wander through its halls and grounds. I wanted a new, fresh place to train, someplace without any connection to losing. But we simply didn’t have another feasible option.

I thought of my dad’s advice to focus on the job, not the surroundings, and decided to embrace the situation rather than try to change it. I told the guys we didn’t
want
to leave the University of Tampa. We wanted our team to become tough, so we wanted camp to be tough. We wanted the grass on the field to give out during the first thunderstorm. We wanted the dorm rooms to be spartan. It was a mind-set shift, and the guys accepted it.

No excuses, no explanations.

As for One Buc, I knew it needed countless improvements—a team meeting room, offices separate from meeting rooms, a room big enough to house all of the weights so some weren’t out on the patio, a third practice field, and so on. But as I told the guys, the Pittsburgh Steelers practiced every day on a sixty-yard Astroturf field … and had won four Super Bowls.

No excuses, no explanations.

At a team meeting, I ran through a laundry list of excuses our players could easily hang a poor season on if they chose to:

• We have a new coaching staff.

• We have to learn a new system on both offense and defense.

• We have sub-par facilities.

• We have a young quarterback.

• We never get the benefit of the doubt from officials.

• We have distractions over a stadium, and we might move cities.

• We never win in the cold.

Those were all great excuses, and we could have used any and all of them. However, our goal was to win football games, and excuses were not an option. Instead, I told them we expected several things of them:

• Be a pro.

• Act like a champion.

• Respond to adversity; don’t react.

• Be on time. Being late means either it’s not important to you or you can’t be relied upon.

• Execute. Do what you’re supposed to do when you’re supposed to do it. Not almost. All the way. Not most of the time. All of the time.

• Take ownership.

Whatever it takes.

No excuses, no explanations.

One of the first articles written in the local newspaper after we took to the practice fields in Tampa pointed out the fact that almost no profanity was heard at practice anymore. While I choose not to use profanity because of my faith, I have never mandated a certain vocabulary from anyone else. I simply ask players and coaches to be mindful of their language when we have open practices during training camp. I think the fact that so many of our assistant coaches were positive teachers helped that process. I also continued to emphasize the need for our staff to be encouraging and positive in their approach to coaching.

Other changes were a little tougher. I cut out the golf carts at camp and made the players walk or take shuttle vans; I wanted to make things just a little more difficult than they were used to. We didn’t allow any hazing of rookies. In fact, I talked often about being a team and developing the trust and togetherness we would need to help us down the road. I couldn’t see any way that hazing could help us to do that. That change probably hurt the veteran players the most since they were now no longer allowed to make the rookies sing during meals at training camp.

The only thing veterans still got were some seniority privileges: signing up for weightlifting times, selecting plane seats, and so forth. I made everyone share a room with another player, so veteran players no longer enjoyed single rooms. I’ve since shifted my thinking on this a bit. We can all learn and adapt even though our principles remain intact, right? Now I allow players to have single rooms on the night before games if they so choose. They’ve convinced me that sleeping patterns can be dramatically different, and too many guys were complaining that their sleep was being disrupted. I do still require roommates at camp, however.

After all the changes to the roster and the beginnings of change to the team’s attitude, we hit the ground running. We were facing the Green Bay Packers in the season opener on the first day of September 1996, in Tampa, and our guys were excited and ready to play. We felt like we were much better than previous Bucs teams mentally, physically, and emotionally, and we embraced the challenge of facing the team that had won our division the year before. I had given the team a talk at the end of the preseason to remind them of the players’ responsibilities and to point out that it might take some time to get the team turned around:

“Coaches can’t tell you everything—if they could, we would need fifty-three coaches. It has to come from you. We
will
get it—eventually. Probably not this year, but we’re going to get the details covered.” But we all believed that the effects of our efforts would be noticed immediately on the field against the Packers.

By halftime we were down 24–3 on our way to a 34–3 loss. Herm turned to me in the locker room and said, “This may be a
little
tougher than we thought.”

There was no doubt about that. After dropping the opener, we headed off to Detroit, where we lost. Then we went to Denver and lost again. The Denver game was one we should have won but for a mistake here and a mistake there. The following week I gave a speech at a United Way rally in Tampa, using the following notes:

“We won’t panic. There won’t be wholesale changes. [We will]
do what we do
because it’s good. Because it’s right. Also, we can’t and won’t let anything from the outside split us up.”

We hung in there as a unit and returned home to face the Seattle Seahawks. The announced crowd was just over thirty thousand, but there couldn’t have been twenty-five thousand in the stands. I kept a video of the beginning of that game, because it had a shot of the crowd at kickoff. That crowd certainly didn’t look “crowded” up there to me. We lost 17–13, squandering a big lead in the fourth quarter. As we walked off the field, a fan hung over the opening, yelling that we stank and that he was never coming back. I remember thinking that day that we really needed to show these people something positive, some progress. I knew it would happen—but when?

The following day I opened the team meeting by showing the game video and telling the team to have faith.

“There is going to be a time soon when fans won’t be able to get a ticket to come to these games. Just hang in there and do what we do, and it will take care of itself.”

We were at home again the following week against Detroit. (As further proof of what a small world it is, Wayne Fontes—the Southern Cal recruiting coordinator who had talked Marvin Powell and Gary Jeter and countless others into playing football for Rich McKay’s dad—manned the other sideline as Detroit’s head coach.) The Lions shut us out and won big. Another debacle. I was thankful that we had a bye the next week and a chance for the guys to get away from football for a while. At this point we were 0–5 with two close losses and three that weren’t so close. We all needed a little time to regroup.

During our bye week, Bryan and Joel Glazer took me to lunch. As Mr. Glazer’s sons, they were in day-to-day control of the team. I was certain they were going to offer suggestions or at least point out that the Buccaneers had been better than this in 1995. But instead of giving advice, they assured me that they were in it for the long haul. They understood that my plan might take time to implement, and they were willing to wait.

“Whatever it is you need to do, you have our complete support.”

This was a very special moment for me, and it remains a wonderful memory. I was so encouraged to have their backing at that low point in my first season with the Bucs.

I brought the coaches in for a meeting that week and gave them the same message, this time coming from me. “We’re going to get this turned around soon,” I told them. “You guys have been great, and the players are buying into what you’re teaching. We don’t have any wins to show for it yet, but we are playing better, and I can see little improvements, even if the rest of the world doesn’t. So hang in there. You have my complete support.”

I called Coach Noll and asked his advice. “Don’t change what you believe in,” he told me. “My first year we won our first game but then lost thirteen in a row. The next year we lost our first four games. Stick with what you want to do, even though it’s not always going to be easy.” Similarly, another experienced
NFL
coach, Dick Vermeil, called to tell me to stick with my plan. He said it looked to him like we were making progress.

Do what we do.

I never doubted we were heading in the right direction, but it was affirming and important to have the owners’ and my coaching peers’ encouragement. Today, whenever I notice other coaches who might need a word of encouragement, I always try to offer it.

We came off our bye week to face Minnesota. Chris Foerster and I had a pretty good idea about their talent and schemes, which probably gave the players a little more confidence. They needed it. After all, Minnesota had the best record in the
NFL
at 5–1, while we were 0–5. And all the while we were telling our guys that our plan was working. We tried to make sure that our Wednesday team meeting was upbeat.

“This is a perfect setup to get our first win,” I told them. “We’ve had a good week of practice, and we’re the healthiest we’ve been all season. They’re the best team in the
NFL
, but we’re getting better each week. Our plan is solid, but this won’t be a ‘game-plan game.’ It will be a passion game. Execution. Attitude. Protect the ball. Have a little swagger.”

We took the field and did all of those things. We trailed 7–0 at halftime. In the second half we scored three touchdowns, including an amazing play by Mike Alstott. Not only was he the battering ram we were expecting on that play, he pushed two guys backward from the five yard line and extended the ball gracefully into the end zone just as he was knocked out of bounds—touchdown. Once we had the lead, Warren Sapp sacked Warren Moon and caused a fumble, which our Chidi Ahanotu recovered. All of a sudden we realized,
We’re going to win.
I can still remember the excitement and relief we felt as the clock wound down and we wrapped up our victory, 24–13.

We gathered for a postgame prayer. We always prayed, as a lot of teams do, both before and after the game. This particular prayer still stands out—not for what was said, which I can’t remember, but because I hoped the guys now realized we were going to give thanks in all circumstances. We had already prayed together following our five losses. I wanted them to know that a great win would not change our core values. We would thank God both as gracious losers and as grateful winners.

Although we had a chance to get on a roll then, we didn’t. In fact, we began another slide as we dropped three more games in a row and fell to 1–8. One of the three, however, was the Packers again, this time up in Green Bay. We lost 13–7, but it was better than being crushed as we had during our first game against those guys. Green Bay was a playoff team, and we had significantly closed the gap. The plan was slowly working.

Do what we do.

Whatever it takes.

No excuses, no explanations.

I pointed to the evidence and made sure the team knew that we had improved, but I also let them know I expected more from them. I said I would continue to treat them as adults—the way I would want to be treated—but I reminded them that there was an alternative.

“A lot of people say I’ve got to make you afraid—afraid of being cut, afraid of me. I don’t believe that’s true.” I have always believed that if you tell people what needs to be done, they will do it—if they believe you and your motives for telling them. I knew these guys would see through manipulation but would respond to motivation.