On Sunday, Bucs coach Raheem Morris removed starting quarterback Byron Leftwich from the 24-0 loss to the Giants.
After the game, Morris said that Leftwich would keep his position.
On Monday, Morris benched Leftwich, dropping him behind both Josh Johnson and Josh Freeman.
On Wednesday, Morris said that Leftwich will nevertheless continue as a team captain.
“He’s still a captain, there’s no doubt about it,” Morris said in comments distributed by the team. “He’s still assuming those responsibilities. He’s helping those guys right now, the young guys. I told you guys he’s a great guy and I meant it. He is a great guy. He’s a team leader. He’s still a team leader. He was a team leader in today’s meeting. He was a team leader on the field today. His positive attitude about this thing is what makes it a little bit easier for this team, what makes it a little bit easier for everybody that loves him, because of how he is, how great a person he is.”
Morris also addressed the general struggles that the team has faced through three games, using some questionable reasoning.
"[W]hen [Tony] Dungy was here, they were starting slow every year,” Morris said. “They would be 0-3, 0-1 or 0-4 and they would run off six or seven wins, take their team to the playoffs, go 9-7, and lose to the Eagles. That was just the nature of the beast around here.”
Ugh. If our eyes aren’t deceiving us, Morris seems to be saying that it’s OK for the 2009 Bucs to be 0-3 because the Buccaneers under Dungy typically dug a hole and then crawled out of it, only to peter out in the first round of the playoffs.
That’s not how we remember it. Because that’s not how it went.
In 1997, the Bucs started off 5-0, finished 10-6, won a playoff game over the Lions, and lost in the divisional round to the Packers.
In 1999, the Bucs started 2-1, went 11-5, won the NFC Central, and nearly beat the supposedly unbeatable Rams for a berth in Super Bowl XXXIV.
In 2000, the Bucs started 3-0, a far cry from 0-2.
In 2001, the Bucs started 2-1, finished 9-7, and lost to the Eagles in the playoffs.
Indeed, the only year the Bucs went 9-7 and lost to the Eagles in the playoffs was 2001, Dungy’s last year with the team.
The bigger problem is that Morris seems to think that the 2009 Bucs are simply going to wake up from an 0-3 nightmare and reel off a bunch of wins simply because he incorrectly recalls that losing early and winning late was the modis operandi during a completely different era in the franchise’s existence.
Look, we know he had to say something in response to the question regarding whether he can turn it around, but it’s odd that he would choose to rely upon bad assumptions that, even if they weren’t bad assumptions, would have no relevance to the present circumstances.
The Bucs under Tony Dungy had guys like Warren Sapp and Warrick Dunn and Derrick Brooks and John Lynch and I don’t see many guys of that skill level on the current roster.
