Unusually suspect

Bucs figure out: You can't spell Super Bowl with no 'O'

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Posted: Tuesday January 25, 2000 04:01 AM

Tampa Bay is averaging 18.3 points per game in Shaun King's six starts, including the playoff win over Washington. Andy Lyons/Allsport

By Ryan Hunt, CNNSI.com

So defense wins championships, right? Yada, yada, yada.

How about this: Teams with suspect offenses don't win Super Bowls. Or more specifically, they don't even get to the Super Bowl.

The 1999 Tampa Bay Buccaneers learned this lesson the hard way. And fittingly, they did so with a six-point performance on offense.

Still, only one team has played in the Super Bowl despite averaging fewer than 20 points a game in the regular season -- the 1977 Denver Broncos, who averaged 19.6 and had the "Orange Crush" defense. They lost to Dallas in Super Bowl XII 27-10.

Tampa Bay, though, averaged a mere 16.9 points per game this season. The Bucs were 28th in the NFL in total offense -- ahead of only the Cardinals, Eagles and Browns -- and only the Chargers, Saints, Cardinals and Browns scored fewer points.

Then again, these are the same Bucs who scored more than 30 only once (a 31-16 win over the Saints). St. Louis, on the other hand, averaged 32.9 points per game in the regular season.

And Tampa Bay's 270 total points are fewer than every team that made it to the Super Bowl when the NFL played a 14-game regular season (the 16-game schedule began in 1978).

And the two lowest-scoring teams ever to make it to the conference championship game since the NFL expanded its season to 16 games? The Bucs (1979) and the Bucs (1999). (The 1977 Minnesota Vikings averaged the fewest points per game [16.5] of any team that advanced to the NFL's final four.)

But the parallels between the only two Tampa Bay teams ever to advance this far are amazing. The '79 Bucs scored 273 points, while the '99 Bucs scored 270. And the '79 team allowed 237 to the '99 squads 235.

And those '79 Bucs lost to the NFC title game to, yep, the Rams.

In fact, the two Rams-Bucs title games are two of the three lowest scoring title games in NFL history.

Hey, that old adage "Offense sells tickets, but defense wins championships" can't be right. After all, the Bucs sold out every game this season.

 

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