There is nothing colder than a football stadium turned silent, nothing in sports quite as chilling as some 67,000 bitterly disappointed fans booing the home team, and perhaps nothing more rewarding for the team that drove them to it.
A lifetime of therapy could not accomplish what Sunday’s 27-10 victory did for a city and a Tampa Bay Buccaneers team that confronted its past, exorcised its demons and took its biggest step forward in defeating the Philadelphia Eagles for the NFC championship. The Bucs earned a trip to San Diego for Super Bowl XXXVII, where they will play the Oakland Raiders.
Somewhere, John McKay, the Bucs’ first coach, is smiling. In Philadelphia, Lee Roy Selmon, their only Hall of Famer, certainly was. And up and down the Gulf Coast of Florida, beleaguered fans of the 27-year-old franchise and bandwagon jumpers alike, are celebrating not merely the team’s first trip to the Super Bowl, but also a thorough triumph most thought they were incapable of pulling off.
“I remember when we were called the `Yuccaneers’ in San Diego,” said Bucs tackle Warren Sapp of an instance in 1996 when Tampa Bay was getting ready to play the Chargers, a year the Bucs won six games and were taking abuse typical of the sort the franchise has been dealt over the years. “I said to [Derrick] Brooks, `Hey, we’ve got to do something about this, man. This just isn’t right.'”
“The bottom line,” recalled Brooks, “is we felt disrespected. And at that moment we made a silent commitment to one another to be a foundation that turned the franchise around. And it’s so ironic and very fitting that we get to go back to San Diego and play for the chance to be world champions.”
As the Eagles lost their second consecutive NFC championship in the last football game to be played at Veterans Stadium, they had but one significant bright patch: Brian Mitchell’s 70-yard kickoff return that led, two plays later, to a 20-yard touchdown run by Duce Staley and an instant 7-0 lead.
A 30-yard field goal by David Akers midway through the second quarter tied the score 10-10, but for all practical purposes, the Eagles were never really in it.
The Bucs took a 17-10 lead on Brad Johnson’s 9-yard touchdown pass to Keyshawn Johnson, capping an 80-yard drive with 2 minutes 28 seconds left in the first half. And they made it 20-10 on Gramatica’s 27-yard field goal with 1:02 left in the third quarter.
Plagued by a subpar performance from quarterback Donovan McNabb, clearly not all the way back from a broken ankle that sidelined him for the last six games of the regular season, and outwitted strategically by Tampa Bay, the Eagles did not have a drive of more than 35 yards in their first 11 possessions.
“It had a lot to do with what we were doing on our side and it all starts with the quarterback,” McNabb said. “I’m very critical of my play and I know I could have made a lot more plays out there, executed a little better and put us in a greater position to score.”
Overwhelmed by the quickness and finesse of the NFL’s No. 1-ranked defense, Philadelphia committed three turnovers, including a fumble by McNabb late in the first half that halted a potential scoring drive at the Bucs’ 24-yard line and an interception of McNabb by Ronde Barber with 6:31 to play that the Bucs cornerback took 92 yards for the game’s final score.
Still, the turning point may well have been the Bucs’ response to the opening kickoff return. The Bucs, who had not scored an offensive touchdown against the Eagles in their last three meetings, drove for a 48-yard field goal by Martin Gramatica. Tampa Bay then took a 10-7 lead on a 1-yard plunge by Mike Alstott after a 7-play, 96-yard drive later in the quarter.
That scoring drive was buoyed by a 71-yard catch by Tampa Bay receiver Joe Jurevicius. He’s one of 26 new players on the Bucs this season, but he barely practiced this week and arrived late to Philadelphia after his wife gave birth to a premature baby who was suffering from complications.
For Bucs coach Jon Gruden, it was the self-described greatest day of his life and a true coaching conquest over a team for whom he once served as offensive coordinator. Stymied offensively and run on defensively in their 20-10 loss to Philadelphia on Oct. 20, the Bucs completely reversed the situation, consistently keeping the Eagles defense off-balance with a methodical attack and putting almost constant pressure on McNabb and his receivers.
Before the game, in an effort to get an already crazed home crowd even more juiced up, the Eagles staged a re-enactment of the great 42-yard run by Wilbert Montgomery–with both Montgomery and former quarterback Ron Jaworski in game jerseys–that helped defeat the Cowboys in the 1980 NFC championship game. Like everything else the Eagles tried, however, it wasn’t enough.
“All we were hearing all week was everything that didn’t have anything to do with the game,” Sapp said. “It was going to snow, the field’s bad, the rowdy crowd at the Vet, it’s going to be the last game, they’re going to re-enact Wilbert Montgomery running. Well, I wish they had put him in the backfield. We play pretty good defense and they were talking like they were just going to mash us. It was a whole week that built up to a fever pitch and we put it on the field for 60 minutes and got us a win. Sweet.”
