BlogLab

Their epic run of futility ended 40 years ago, but the legend of the 0-14 expansion Tampa Bay Bucs endures. You may know the story of those 1976 Bucs, the most infamous winless wonder in sports history, but do you know the epilogue to that story? How a team ridiculed as the NFL’s ultimate losers set new standards for offensive ineptitude a year later in 1977?

Advertisement

Mocked and lampooned, the star-crossed Bucs were a national punchline for the first three months of the 1977 season, becoming regular fodder for comedian Johnny Carson’s “The Tonight Show” monologue. Through 12 more winless games that year, Tampa Bay had the worst offense the modern-day NFL has seen, establishing a record of failure that likely will never be matched. While Tampa Bay’s defense was young, hungry and talent-laden, keeping the Bucs in almost every game, its offense was historically feeble. To wit:

— The Bucs scored a mere 53 points in its first 12 games, and 23 of those 53 points were scored in a 30-23 loss at fellow expansion-team Seattle, meaning Tampa Bay totaled 30 points in its 11 losses to established NFL clubs—or less than three per game for almost three months.

— The team scored a total of three points in its first six home games, going touchdown-less in front of their fans until the regular-season finale, when they beat the reeling St. Louis Cardinals 17-7. That’s 20 points all season at home—or less than a field goal per game.

— The Bucs “exploded’’ for 50 points in two victories to end the ’77 season, nearly matching its total of 53 points in its opening 12 games. But with 103 points in 14 games, the team’s 7.35 per game average was the lowest figure recorded since the 1970 NFL-AFL merger and fell well short of the league average of 17.2.

— Almost inconceivably, Tampa Bay totaled just seven offensive touchdowns all season, with the defense reaching the end zone four times on returns. The Bucs offense was so anemic it failed to crack 200 total yards nine times in 14 games and was held to less than 90 yards passing in eight games.

Four decades after they painfully carved out a legacy as the offensive disaster by which all offensive disasters must be measured, here’s an oral history of that stupefying 1977 season in Tampa Bay:

Rich McKay, then the 18-year-old son of Bucs head coach John McKay, and currently the Atlanta Falcons team president: It was hard. Just a long year. God almighty, my dad, I could just feel it when I talked to him. That was the longest year of his career by far. That was the first year I was in college (at Princeton), so I saw that season from afar, after having been there for all of 1976 (he served as a team ball boy that year). I came home for some home games, but I wasn’t living it every day, didn’t have to go through all the pain that the household and coaching staff was going through.

Advertisement

Linebacker Richard “Batman’’ Wood, who came to Tampa Bay from the Jets in a 1976 late preseason trade: That season, it was so frustrating. I tell people we should have been in the playoffs or close to a playoff team our second year of existence. A lot of people still, all they think about is that 1979 season (the Bucs went 10-6 and won the NFC Central) and say that was your best year. I say, no, no, no. In ’77, we had one of the best defenses in the National Football League. We just had no continuity on offense. We had three different starting quarterbacks: Gary Huff, Randy Hedberg and Jeb Blount. All good guys, but you and I both know you have to be a competent team to score in the NFL.

We were just terrible on offense at that time. We really were. I was throwing my helmet after the game inside the locker room. I was just absolutely at wit’s end. It was just so frustrating. You were asking yourself all the time, ‘What can I do to help the team win? Are we going to win today? I mean, God almighty, help us.’

Linebacker David Lewis, the Bucs’ second-round pick in 1977, out of USC: Most of us on defense were just coming out of college in the past two years, and a lot of us came from winning programs. The Selmons (Lee Roy and Dewey) came from Oklahoma. Batman and me from SC. Mike Washington from Alabama. Cecil Johnson from Pitt. I came in as a rookie and I didn’t know much about losing. Every week I tried to go out there and kill somebody to win. Our theme on defense was: Get us 10 (points) and we’ll win. We thrived on the idea let’s get one, let’s get just one win. We had talent on defense, but what was missing was that quarterback. I don’t think we had a quarterback who fit coach McKay’s style of play.

Quarterback was a problem for the Bucs, the same way the hole left by the iceberg was a problem for the Titanic. Tampa Bay passers threw just three touchdown passes that season, compared to 30 interceptions —a 1-to-10 touchdown-to-interception ratio. Huff tossed all three of those scoring passes, with 13 picks in his six starts. Hedberg, a rookie, had 10 interceptions, and Blount, another rookie, contributed seven picks.

Huff, the fifth-year veteran and former Bears’ second-round pick out of Florida State, was from Tampa and had starred at a local high school. He signed with the team after the 1976 season, replacing Steve Spurrier, who retired and went into coaching instead of enduring another long year with the Bucs. In 1977, Huff led Tampa with 889 yards passing and a 37.4 passer rating. The low point of the season for Huff came in a 13-0 Week 6 loss at home to Green Bay, when he was slung down by a Packers defender, tearing the cartilage around his sternum. An angry and frustrated Bucs crowd cheered as he lay writhing on the turf.

Quarterback Gary Huff: If I had fractured my sternum, it wouldn’t have hurt as much. It tore all the cartilage and for about two weeks my wife had to raise me out of bed and help me lean back to go to sleep. You’d hear these crackling sounds if I tried to get up myself. I missed five games after that happened. It the toughest season of my career. I hurt my knee in the preseason and missed a bunch of games, then I hurt my sternum. One of the big things I remember was the first game I started, as I ran out of the field there were boos. There was such a strong feeling for Steve Spurrier because he was a Gator and Tampa was about 85 percent Gators fans back then. So there was a lot resentment just from that.

Punter-kicker Dave Green: I remember the fans cheering when Gary Huff got hurt one game. That was really disheartening to everybody. It really knocks you down to another level, to hear fans cheering an injury. That was one of the times that season that felt like an all-time low.

Advertisement

Rich McKay: In ’77, the fans were embarrassed by the team. And that created some anger. It just felt a lot different than ’76, our first season. The town was now a little embarrassed and they weren’t happy to have a team. That was when you had the Johnny Carson show and others weighing in almost every week. There’s no question the quarterback play wasn’t stellar, but I’m not going to put it all on them. The offensive line didn’t have its best year either. I just remember a lot of sacks and a lot of turnovers.

Green: It seemed like every time we got the ball that season, the special teams coaches were calling for the punt team, and most of the time when I went in, it felt like it was 4th and 80. We would go backwards a lot. I think I punted 98 times that season, and it would have been more except there were so many interceptions and fumbles.

Huff: It was a college offense, the one John McKay had won with at USC, when he could recruit some of the best athletes in the country. We were running that pitch sweep every first down, and in the NFL, they can react to that play so quickly. We were always in second-and-12 or second-and-15. They put on a reel one time of our 28-pitch sweep and somebody realized we were averaging minus 1.5 yards on that play.

You didn’t have the tools to audible against certain coverages. Your receivers weren’t making route adjustments depending on the technique the defensive backs were using against them. We didn’t have check-offs or hot receivers. A lot of it didn’t make sense to me. I know this: If we hadn’t been running that USC offense, we would have done much better. But in John McKay’s defense, he didn’t have to do anything fancy at USC. You don’t get fancy in football unless you have to do it.

Rich McKay: If you look at my dad’s offense in ’78 and ’79 and going forward, it never looked again like it did in ’76 and ’77. He modernized what he had brought from USC. Heck, by the time he left the Bucs (in ’84), it was a throwing team not a running team.

The Bucs defense in ’77 was positively Herculean for most of the season. Tampa Bay allowed only 223 points that year, averaging 15.9 per game, after surrendering a hefty 412 in 1976 (29.4). Nine of the Bucs’ 12 losses were by 13 points or less, creating an organization-wide feeling of being so close and yet so far from victory. Imagine being a Bucs season-ticket holder and seeing your team lose its first six home games by scores of 9-3, 10-0, 13-0, 10-0, 17-0 and 10-0. That’s giving up just 69 points in six games (11.5) and still going winless.

Lewis: I felt like as the season went on we got worn down on defense. But we never quit. We kept believing. And we had fun on defense. Although there was the 0-26 thing, that was a close-knit defense. We just kept believing we were going to get it done. We really didn’t have time to think about what the offense wasn’t doing right.

Ron Wolf, Bucs general manager in 1976-77 and member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame for his role in creating Green Bay’s success of the 1990s and early 2000’s: We put together a pretty dang good defense, and they played about 67 percent of the snaps that season. That was one of the better defenses in the NFC. The offense wasn’t on the field very much. It was just a terrible offense. But we had a strong defense with a pretty good secondary. Mark Cotney, Cedric Brown, Jeris White, Mike Washington, those guys, they’d really blow you up. Our safeties probably couldn’t play today with the current rules.

Advertisement

Green: It was a hell of a defense. It was impressive what they did. I would sit there on Mondays and watch the team meetings, and the offense would have one reel of film with maybe 30 or 40 plays on it. Then the defense would go in there with stacks of film and they’d be in there forever watching those games. So you knew the defense was on the field most of the time, taking all the plays.

Safety Mark Cotney, who came to Tampa Bay in the 1976 expansion draft, after spending his 1975 rookie season in Houston, with an Oilers team that went 10-4 under first-year head coach Bum Phillips: Our defensive meeting room at One Buc Place (the cramped, rather spartan team complex) was right before you walked out the door, while the offensive meeting room was in the back of the building. We wouldn’t even be through watching the first half of our game tape on a Monday and the offensive guys would already be walking by, looking in the window and laughing at us, like, ‘Hey, we’re outta here.’ We’d have three rolls of film and they’d have like half a roll.

Huff: Cotney played 10 years in the NFL, but he should get pension for 15 years. Those guys on defense the first two years in Tampa Bay, they need to give them like a double pension payment. It’s amazing there was never any friction I can remember between the offense and defense. The defense just bucked it up and went out there and played their butts off.

John McKay’s infamous temper reached a boiling point after a 10-0 Week 4 loss to visiting Washington. The Bucs offense produced just 136 total yards and 11 first downs, with a mere 39 yards passing and five turnovers. In frustration, he slammed his hand on a blackboard in the locker room.

Rich McKay: He hits the chalkboard, then turns to the team and says, ‘Now look what you made me do.’ The doctor sees him and says, ‘Hey, this is broken.’ But I think all they did was wrap it up in a towel and he just kept going. He never put it in a cast. Ever. So, for four or five years, we would play golf, and if he would hit a ball with that hand the wrong way, he would really wince, because it never healed right.

Green: My locker was right before you got to the coaches’ locker room. McKay came in, slammed his hand on the blackboard and looked at me and said, ‘Damn. David, I think I just broke my wrist.’ Another time he stopped and said ‘I know how Mr. Culverhouse (Bucs owner Hugh Culverhouse) can make a lot of money. If he just let everyone come into the game for free, then charged them to leave he’d make big bucks.’

Huff: John McKay, just sitting down and talking with him, personally he was the kind of guy I would like. He had a great sense of humor, a real dry wit. But he had a wit that sometimes didn’t convey the humor. It could be cruel.

Cotney: There’s not anybody who was less fun to play for than McKay. I hated playing for him. I really did. He thought if we practiced hard enough and tackled enough like he did it at USC, we would win. All we did was run that sweep left and sweep right. That’s why Spurrier retired. Spurrier was about to go crazy in ’76. He said, ‘Hell, that’s one reason why I wanted to get into coaching, because I know I can be a better coach than that.’ McKay had no idea what it was like to play in the NFL because he’d been at USC and been able to recruit any athlete in the whole nation if he wanted him. When you’ve got O.J. Simpson running the ball, a lot of good college coaches could win doing that.

Advertisement

McKay was brutal with his comments. I remember once he cut a guy who joked that he didn’t like how his cigar smelled. He was capable of doing anything. He was capable of saying anything. And man did he work us. We were beat up in ’76 even before the game started, from hitting each other. It was tough. If you learn more from defeats than you do wins, then we learned a lot. Twenty-six games in a row worth.

In Week 12 against the visiting Chicago Bears, the tide began to slightly turn for the frustrated Bucs. Tampa Bay lost that day, 10-0, to a Bears team that would go on to qualify for the playoffs for the first time since 1963. But the Bucs defense took heart at how tough they played against the great Walter Payton, the third-year Bears running back who was then in the midst of an MVP season. In a game that remained scoreless into the fourth quarter, Payton had to carry a whopping 33 times just to scratch out 101 yards rushing (3.1 average, well below his 5.5 season average).

Lewis: We felt it coming. We felt like if we played the best in Walter, we could play against anybody. Walter was a measuring stick for us. He was the best player in the league at the time. If we could do that to him, we could do that to anybody. That gave us confidence to do what we needed to do finally get that first win.

New Orleans quarterback Archie Manning: I was talking to Walter Payton the week we played the Bucs, and the Bears had barely gotten past Tampa Bay the Sunday before. He said ‘Y’all got the Bucs this week,’ and I said they’re good, too. He said ‘You’re dang right they’re good.’ Then I told reporters nobody wants to be the first team to lose to them, which I mean is true. But somehow John McKay used that for bulletin board material and all of a sudden it’s like I had mouthed off.

What Manning actually said was that it would be “a disgrace’’ to be the first team to lose to the 0-26 Bucs, and naturally Tampa Bay focused on the word disgrace. Whatever the motivation, it was finally the Bucs’ day in the Superdome in Week 13. Tampa Bay blasted the 3-9 Saints, who were an 11-point favorite at home. Fittingly, the defense keyed the 33-14 win, intercepting six passes, returning three for second-half touchdowns. Huff hit receiver Morris Owens on a 5-yard touchdown pass for Tampa Bay’s only offensive TD, and Green converted field goals of 40 and 25 yards. Two weeks later the Saints fired future Hall of Fame head coach Hank Stram, ending his NFL career.

Wolf: In the win in New Orleans the defense outscored the offense, so that’s a great trivia question for a franchise’s first win. But it was kind of apropos.

Rich McKay: My brother-in-law actually called me from the locker room, at halftime, because they knew they were going to win. It was crazy, because there was already a little giddiness. Which is not great, given the game was 13-0 at the half.

Huff: The big thing that game was I changed a few plays. I told the guys we’re not going to go through this year without winning a game. So if a play comes in that you guys don’t like, let me know. We got out of some bad plays during that game. We just came together and said we’re going to win this damn thing.

Green: In New Orleans, it was just an elated sideline the whole game. We were really pumped up. We went in for a fake punt and I hit (defensive back) Danny Reece and got a first down. I remember everybody was like, ‘Throw it to me, throw it to me, I’ve been open all day.’ I said everybody’s open all day, it’s punting. It was laughable. Like a bunch of kids drawing up a play in the dirt.

Advertisement

Cotney: You can only imagine after 26 losses in a row what that felt like. Just to get that win and get into the locker room and get that monkey off our backs. Hell, it was a gorilla. It wasn’t a monkey. Then getting home and seeing 10,000 people lined up to greet us all way from the airport to the One Buc Place. It was amazing, truly amazing.

Rick McKay: That week I came home from school and I remember the atmosphere in town was ridiculous. And they had won just one game. But it was euphoric because it felt like that weight had been lifted.

Manning: Here’s what people don’t know: That was a damn good defense and they had really played people close. Their offense wasn’t very good, but you knew they’d beat somebody soon. It was time for them to win a game and unfortunately, it was against us. It was double bad for me because they said I motivated them, which was bullcrap. I didn’t even want to go out in public that night to dinner, so my wife and I and a couple of our friends ate at a restaurant where the owner was a friend of mine, and he put our table behind this drapery.

The suddenly confident Bucs won again the next week, in their season finale, beating the St. Louis Cardinals 17-7 at Tampa Stadium. The Cardinals, coached by Don Coryell, had been 7-3 and seemingly playoff-bound, but they lost their final four games and finished 7-7. They parted ways with Coryell just days after the season ended. So both ultra-accomplished coaches who lost to the ’77 Bucs ended up unemployed. Such was the stigma of losing to Tampa Bay.

Green: Before the Cardinals game, Coach McKay told us they wanted us to line up at midfield and the announcer was going to say the Buccaneers would like to thank you for your support all year, and we were supposed to tip our helmets to one side of the stadium and then turn around and tip it to the other side. We were like, oh, this is corny. We’re not a bunch of high school kids coming out here to say thank you and act happy to be 1-12.

But when we started to wave to one side, the whole place went ballistic. I’ve never heard fans more excited. I thought I was going to get pneumonia from the chills we got from those fans. You would have thought we were Super Bowl heroes. It was nuts. And then they tore the goal posts down when we won. Who else tears the goal posts down when you’re 2-26?

Cotney: Those two wins gave us a little hope for the offseason. At least we weren’t 0-28. It really did start the whole worst-to-first thing that we accomplished in 1979. That’s where it really started, those last two games in ’77, giving us that hope and confidence that we could compete in the league. Those two games were huge.

Jim Hart, Cardinals quarterback: The Bucs’ momentum had certainly switched and we were somewhat relieved that they beat the Saints the week before, because we didn’t want to go up against them when they were still winless. It was a no-win situation for us, but they deserved to win. We stunk up the joint and they played really well. We couldn’t blame anybody but ourselves.

Advertisement

Dan Dierdorf, Cardinals offensive tackle and Pro Football Hall of Fame member: The circumstances surrounding that game and they were the worst maybe of any game I ever played in the NFL. Our coach, Don Coryell, had been with us five years, and it was over. He was out. He was gone and we knew it. So we go to Tampa a completely befuddled and demoralized football team. We couldn’t have beaten anybody that day.

Wood: You talk about relief? Please. It was like someone took that thousand-pound weight off your back. Just to win those last two games was something that gave us momentum going into the next year. Then we drafted (quarterback) Doug (Williams) in ’78, and in ’79 we broke out and went to the playoffs. But ’77 is where everything started for us on defense.

Green: Being with those early Bucs, it’s a heck of a thing to be remembered for. On that bus ride back from the airport to One Buc, after the Saints win, Mark Cotney stood up and said, ‘Gentlemen, I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is we won a game.’ And everybody went crazy. And then he said, ‘The bad news is we’re 1-26.’ It got so quiet all you could hear were the fans outside. It was just that shot of reality.

But I’ve got grandkids now and they’re all running around saying, ‘Grandpa played football?’ Yeah, yeah, I did. Then all of a sudden they’re seeing all these things about the early Bucs, and it’s ‘Oh, my God, you played on the worst team in the world?’ And I’m like, Yeah, yeah, your Grandpa wasn’t worth a shit. It’s kind of demeaning. But it all ends with a feel-good feeling, because we won those last two games.

ncG1vNJzZmismJqutbTLnquim16YvK57kHBobGhgZH9xfZZoaGtnYW18tbTEZq6oqqOperCyxZ6lrJ1dnrtuusWlZKGho6m8s8WMoqVmrJiaeri70Z2qZqeWYsGpu9KeZLCgn2K5qsLEnWStoKKkwqi0jKKraA%3D%3D