Do You Love Football?! (24 page)

At first I think it was a little bit of a shock to them because they weren't used to having the offense or the head coach constantly coming after them in practice. They soon discovered that I was an equal-opportunity pain in the ass. They would hear me yelling at a wide receiver who busted an alignment or when the offense blew a scheme. I think they liked the fact that we all had accountability. We were challenging the offense to not only become a good offense, "but how about daring to become a great offense?"

I try to get to know my audience a little bit and try to stimulate the crowd I'm with. We have a lot of guys in Tampa who respond maybe a little differently from guys we had in Oakland.

Not that those Raider players didn't respond, but nothing ever stays the same when you go from one team to another. I don't have a speech I give for opening games or for playoff games. I've just got to have an urge for what I think is appropriate for that particular situation at that particular time. It might be a case of using something that has just happened in society in general. Or sometimes I have too many cups of coffee on a given day and I'll come across a little strange.

What I say is never quite the same each time. I might talk about occasionally walking through a graveyard, reading the headstones and thinking about what sort of lives the deceased left behind. "One day that's going to be you, six feet under the ground, dead," I'll say to the players. "Are you going to do something before you die? Are you going to do something so that there'll be more than just dates on the tombstone to remember you by?"

I listen to a lot of rock and roll music. Sometimes, if I hear a good line, I'll write it down. Like in AC/DC's "Highway to Hell," there's a line that says, "No stop signs. No speed limits."

Then I'll be on the practice field and if I'm not happy with the tempo, I might start yelling, "There's no stop signs, guys! There's no speed limits!" Wait a minute. Where have I heard that before? One of these days an AC/DC fan lurking on our team is going to say, "Hey, I know where that's from." It hasn't happened yet.

Now I realize there reaches a point where the players get a little sick of hearing from me all the time. I talk to the team during minicamp, during training camp, in the morning, after practice. To try to break up the monotony during the 2002 season, I gave some of our assistant coaches four games each to stand up once a week and address the football team. The first four games belonged to Rod Marinelli, the second went to Mike Tomlin and Joe Barry, the next four were Bill Muir's and the last four were Monte Kiffin's. Each coach would present a theme and give the keys to that week's game. As soon as the schedule came out, I told the coaches which games they were assigned, so they would do their research on the opponents. It was their chance to summarize the Saints, the Rams, and the rest of the teams on our schedule. What's it going to take to beat these guys?

I had never done anything like that before, but these are guys that I listen to, guys who give me juice all the time. It only made sense to let all the players hear from them, too. I just thought it would be a good way to generate some extra responsibility for our coaches while giving our players a different perspective and a chance to get to know our whole staff. I thought it would help us come together as a team and get away from having only the offensive linemen hear the offensive line coach and only the defensive linemen hear the defensive line coach and so on. Now the running backs could say, "Let's hear what the linebackers coach has to say."

Marinelli-whose shaved head, military backround and no nonsense approach reminds me so much of Bobb McKittrick started off the year by talking about a big rock.

"That rock is your opponent and you've got to keep pounding on it with a hammer," he said. "That rock is going to crack if you just keep pounding on it. You might not smash it the first four or five times. But you just think about one guy pounding that rock with a singular, tiny hammer. Then you think about two guys holding that hammer, pounding the same rock. Then you think about Warren Sapp showing up with his big howitzer hammer, smashing that rock.

"You think about pounding that damn rock all day, every day for four quarters. It's hot out. You're sweating. You're thinking, That rock ain't gonna crack. But you have to keep pounding that rock because it will crack."

At the end of every practice I always call on a different player to give us the break after we gather together in the middle of the field. Not long after Rod's speech, I started hearing each one say, "Pound the rock, on three! One, two, three, pound the rock!"

The next thing I knew, players were talking about "pounding the rock" in the newspaper. I started seeing signs all over the stadium that said, "Pound the rock!" I saw T-shirts that said it.

Everybody bought into that theme.

Four weeks into the season, Tim Sain, our equipment manager, actually brought a two-foot-long, ten-inch-high rock into the locker room before our game in Cincinnati. It has become a prominent and permanent symbol for our team ever since. Tim cemented the rock to a nice blue base, and it comes with us wherever we go. A lot of players make sure to touch it on the way to the field while others just kind of look at it. Me? I rub it carefully. I'm not going to reveal where Tim got the rock. That's just going to have to be part of the mystique of the Buccaneers.

But I need help to lead. I can't be the Lone Ranger. I rely on the coaches to give me some juice. The players do, too. And they rely on each other for juice. Lomas Brown, an eighteen-year veteran offensive tackle and the only guy we had who had been in a Super Bowl (with the Giants), spoke to our team down the stretch. We also heard speeches from Doug Williams, the first great quarterback for the Buccaneers and someone who went on to win a Super Bowl with Washington, and Ronnie Lott, another major contributor to Super Bowl success with San Francisco.

As we got ready for a late-season game against the Lions in Detroit, I had Wayne Fontes, the all-time winningest coach in Lions history and the ex-defensive coordinator for the Bucs who lives in Tampa, come in to tell the players what they could expect on their trip.

"Let me tell you something about Detroit," Wayne said in his rapidfire style. "They are tough to beat in Detroit. Those Detroit Lions fans are passionate and they're going to stay with them, so you'd better get off the bus ready to play." I can't put the rest of what Wayne said in this book, but let's just say it had a lot in common with some of Ray Rhodes's best speeches. By the way, we beat the Lions 23-20. Thanks for the help, Wayne.

Probably the best two or three hours I spent at the 2002 Scouting Combine were at a restaurant with Norv Turner, talking about Brad Johnson. Norv was beginning his first year as offensive coordinator of the Miami Dolphins, but when he was head coach of the Washington Redskins, Brad was one of his quarterbacks. In 1999 Norv saw Brad throw for 4,005 yards, the second-highest total in Redskin history.

"You're going to love this guy," Norv told me. "This is a real pro. He can make all the throws. He's got better movement than people think. He is tough as hell. You'll love him."

We had signed Rob Johnson as a free agent to give us some depth and competition at quarterback. We had a young guy in Shaun King, who had a little experience as a starter. While installing the offense in the offseason, we'd go outside to work with all three quarterbacks. I'd look at the grades at the end of the day, and next to Brad's name I'd see complete, complete, complete, complete, complete . . . plus, plus, plus, plus, plus. He rarely ever made a mistake. When he did, he never made the same one twice. He was just a consistent, improving football player who had an undying thirst for details. He gave me good feedback. He understood the game. He saw everything.

Brad is a quieter guy than Rich Gannon, but from a professional standpoint they're very similar. I respect Brad tremendously as a player. He makes helpful suggestions, such as pointing out a play that is similar to one he had run in Washington and talking about how he had executed it there. He accepts coaching. He absorbs a whole lot of football in a very short amount of time and executes well. He is a stud, man.

One thing we learned in talking with Brad was that he isn't the most comfortable wet-ball passer. Rich isn't, either. I don't know many quarterbacks who are, other than Brett Favre. So one of the things we incorporated into our practices with the Bucs is soaking the footballs, just the way I learned to do it back at Tennessee. You never know when you're going to get a violent thunderstorm in Tampa. If you don't practice a wet-ball exchange, how are you ever going to be ready for it in a game?

In the eyes of a lot of people, my relationship with Keyshawn Johnson is defined by his sideline tirade directed at me in front of the Monday Night Football cameras during our September 23 game against St. Louis. That was one snapshot in a much larger photo album of our first season together, and it had absolutely nothing to do with how we got along before that moment or since.

Keyshawn wasn't the first player to get in my face. He won't be the last. What brought on that outburst in the Rams' game was that we decided to go with "U" personnel-two tight ends, two backs, one receiver. It's a good running formation because you can have a big tight end on both sides and balance the defense, and you can throw out of it if you choose to. I called, "U Keenan," which meant Keenan McCardell, who has caught 640 passes in his career, would be in on that particular play and Keyshawn had to come out. Keyshawn got mad and let me know about it on the sidelines. There really wasn't anything for me to say in response.

As a coach, my job is to keep looking at the big picture, keep striving to have the right group of players on the field for the right situation. That's why we have "U Keyshawn," where Keenan comes out and Keyshawn stays in. I'm sure Keenan isn't any happier about being on the sidelines than Keyshawn is. In our playoff game against San Francisco, we went with "U Jurevicius," when both "keys" to our success were on the sidelines, and we threw a touchdown to Joe Jurevicius.

You can't please everybody all the time. I just came from Oakland, where we had Jerry Rice and Tim Brown. We went with "U" personnel a lot there. I had to take Jerry Rice, the greatest receiver in the history of football, out of the game at times. He didn't like it, either. In Philadelphia, sometimes Irving Fryar came out of games. In Green Bay, it was Sterling Sharpe.

Try dealing with that sort of thing with Sterling Sharpe and Mark Clayton when you're a twenty-eight-year-old coach.

They're not going to yell at Mike Holmgren, so guess who they're yelling at?

On every sideline, I've seen players bitching at their coaches and vice versa. What world do you think we live in as NFL coaches? You've got fifty-three guys. Only forty-seven are active. They all want to play. There are going to be guys who get mad. Even the starters who aren't yanked out lose their temper if things aren't going the way they want them to.

It's like me playing in a scramble golf tournament. Every once in a while I get fired up, especially if our group is playing well. When the guy we're counting on to be our "A" player duffs a shot in a key situation, I'm going to yell, "What the hell are you doing?" It doesn't mean I don't love our "A" player.

It's like when you chastise one of your kids. When I yell, "Don't do that!" to one of my sons, it doesn't mean I don't love him. Yet when America sees the same sort of thing on TV, all of a sudden there's a "major rift" between the coach and the receiver. All of a sudden, the quarterback and the coach are "at odds." Give me a break.

TWELVE
Validation
When It All Comes Together

I SENSED THAT OUR PLAYERS were uncomfortable before our season opener against New Orleans in Raymond James Stadium. They just didn't have any feel for what the new routine was going to be like with me as their coach. Do we pray before the game? Do we pray after the game? How is this coach, this "Chucky" guy, going to be if we lose? How is he going to be on game day? Are we allowed to have our music on in the locker room? Can we have the TV on to watch the other games before our game?

Even though we had gone through a four-game preseason, everybody was just a little bit tight. And it showed on the field.

For the second time in my career, I lost a head coaching debut.

The Saints beat us 26-20 in overtime when Tom Tupa, our punter and a former quarterback, tried a desperation throw from our end zone when he sensed that his kick in OT was going to be blocked. Tom is right-handed, so when Fred McAfee broke through and grabbed his right arm, Tom tried a left-handed pass. James Allen easily intercepted it in the end zone to give New Orleans the win. It wasn't quite as bad as that 28-8 loss at Kansas City in my first game with the Raiders, but we still didn't play worth a damn on either side of the ball.

I was especially disappointed that our defense had given up 368 yards. It seemed like the Saints had too easy a time moving up and down the field. So the night before our second game, in Baltimore, I wanted to get a clear message across to the defense.

I called those guys out by calling out John Lynch because I knew he'd respond.

"John, I'm a great admirer of yours," I began. "I'm a great admirer of this defense. But we're 0-1. We're on the road. We need to win, okay?

"New Orleans comes to our town and gets four straight third-down conversions. What the hell are we doing, John? Can we address that this week? We've got a young quarterback we're facing in Chris Redman. He's had one career start. Do you have a little bit of a pissed-off feel about yourself tonight?

Good. Take it out on Chris Redman and the Ravens tomorrow.

Let's get our act together on defense.

"On offense, don't hallucinate when the ball is snapped.

Play! Do we want to be a world-championship team? Do you guys want to dominate? Then dominate. Play like a champion, and don't worry about the consequences. Don't be afraid of success. Don't be afraid of being on the cover of every magazine in the world."