by Tony Dungy
No excuses, no explanations.
As a team, we got some lasting benefit from that experience. For the next several years, when we’d get into crunch time in a game, I’d occasionally hear a player call out, “Come on, guys! It’s time for a five o’clock bus ride!”
Whatever it takes.
* * *
That first year, we definitely inherited some talent. In 1995, the Bucs had two first-round draft picks and came out with a terrific haul—Warren Sapp and Derrick Brooks. When I got there in 1996, we had two more first-round picks, and we added to our defensive line again with both picks—Regan Upshaw and Marcus Jones. In the defensive scheme we planned to run, defensive linemen would be critical. Rod Marinelli loved coaching in our system because of the spotlight it placed on his defensive linemen.
My goal was to add to our core through the draft and then continue to add strategically through free agency. We wanted guys who had been productive in college, and we made it a point to pick performance over potential. Because the salary cap limits each team’s total payroll, we only wanted to pay significant sums to keep truly special players. We decided we would let others leave for greener pastures in free agency, even if it meant taking a slight step backward while we groomed a successor.
After emphasizing defense in the first round of the 1996 draft, we turned our attention to getting a big-play guy on offense in the second round. The Jets had the first pick in each round that year (they took Keyshawn Johnson first overall). We wanted Leeland McElroy, a running back out of Texas A&M, but we doubted he would still be available when our number five pick came in the second round. So Tim Ruskell, our director of player personnel, lined up a trade with the Jets if McElroy was still available when their pick arrived. He got on the phone with Jets assistant general manager James “Shack” Harris, working out the particulars of the trade. I heard Tim conclude the conversation with, “But if our player is still on the board, we have a deal, right? Good.”
The Redskins made their pick at the end of the first round, and McElroy was still on the board. We were ecstatic, and Tim had Shack on speed dial. Before Shack answered, however, the Jets’ pick came in: Alex Van Dyke from Nevada—the Jets’ second wide receiver in two rounds. They hadn’t kept their part of our deal.
Tim was not happy when Shack picked up the phone and said, “Tim, I’m so sorry. When Van Dyke was still there, the coaches just went ahead and took him right away.”
We were thrown for a loop and began frantically working the phones to try again to move up from our pick. We called the three remaining teams in front of us, sure that one of them would take McElroy. We were offering picks, players, our children . . . but the Arizona Cardinals took McElroy with the next pick.
The Jets, as it turned out, had been our only hope.
We were disappointed and frustrated, but we had only two picks in which to gather ourselves and decide whom we wanted next. We had been so focused on McElroy that we needed time to turn our attention to others—time we didn’t have. Even though we needed a great, game-changing back, we decided our best option was to make do with the next player on our board—a battering-ram, short-yardage running back.
Mike Alstott.
Of course, after the pick, we knew we would need to meet with the media and say how thrilled we were to have Mike. But as we gave our separate interviews, I know we were all extremely disappointed at how close we had been to getting McElroy. Years later, we came out looking like geniuses for having picked Alstott. He went on to become the second-leading rusher in Buccaneers history and to score almost twice as many touchdowns as any other player in the history of the franchise. I’m a firm believer that the Lord sometimes has to short-circuit even our best plans for our benefit.
We had two picks in that second round, and we were prepared to trade our second pick. Rich had told me during the week that Bobby Beathard of San Diego would probably call and offer us their first-round pick in 1997 for our second-rounder this year. Given that we had so many needs, we figured that was the way to go. If he called.
When that pick was approaching, I was starting to have second thoughts. We still hadn’t fully recovered from the McElroy/Alstott pick, and I was focused on Donnie Abraham. Donnie would fit our scheme perfectly; he was a solid person, exactly the kind of guy Monte and Herm would like to add to our defense. While we knew that building for the future with an extra first-rounder next year made sense, our previous pick hadn’t gone well, and we wanted to walk out of there with a second-rounder we liked.
When we were on the clock to make our pick, the phone rang. I’m still amazed that Bobby called, just like Rich had said he would. Rich told him we would call him back. We debated and finally decided to trade.
Donnie Abraham was still there when we picked in the third round, making our 1996 draft a nice combination of preparation and God’s providence.
By the way, two years later, we added Leeland McElroy to our roster when Arizona cut him. Although he was a good player and a great person, he couldn’t make our team. Funny how things work out.
As we were adding players through the draft and free agency to improve our level of talent, we had to continue working on the mind-set of a group that had lived so many years within a negative culture. I thought back to the things Tom Lamphere and I had talked about. Nehemiah also inherited a defeated group and had to change their culture and attitude so they could move forward. Nehemiah kept his people focused on their task of rebuilding the wall around Jerusalem. Rather than dividing their attention and focusing on the external threat that sought to destroy them, they stayed ready with their swords by their sides while they continued to work on the wall. Each person and family worked to build the portion of the wall in front of where they lived.
The Buccaneers were a group in need of remaining on task, focusing on what was before them. I knew that my job was to keep the guys focused on the things they could control, not on outside noises from media and fans or other things they couldn’t control.
It’s hard enough to be successful in this league—and in life—without hauling around the extra baggage of distractions. Right off the bat, we discussed how to deal with the media. “Negative will sell,” I told the team. “But so will the positive. So let’s always be positive. Whether you like them or not, the media will always be present in the NFL. It’s a fact of life, so you have to deal with it and make it as positive as possible. If they hate you, they won’t suddenly disappear. They’ll just make your life miserable. So don’t give them reason to hate you.”
We then discussed body language and the importance of nonverbal cues. “Make eye contact when you’re answering the media. Don’t act like a loser, even when you’ve lost. Don’t blame anybody else.” We had to make sure that we were together in this project.
We needed to let the media do their jobs, but we also needed to be proactive about getting the message out rather than letting them dictate the stories. I always tried to be very cordial with the media, and my goal was always to be sure that my responses were well thought out. I never wanted to antagonize anyone, but I planned to answer the questions in a way that emphasized the positives without giving away too much information. I think the media appreciated our treating them professionally and with respect, although winning probably improved the tone of their stories more than anything else.
No excuses, no explanations.
* * *
Talent at Tampa Bay wasn’t a major issue. The Vikings had played the Bucs twice a year, so I already knew the talent level was good. The Bucs had also been drafting many of the guys that we had wanted for the Vikings—Sapp, Brooks, and John Lynch among them—so I knew the Bucs had been drafting the right guys, at least on defense. When I arrived in Tampa, the talent was there. It was the culture that had to change.
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 t
hat 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.