Ugly Win Is Still A Win
October 4th, 2011
Joe is trying to shake the cobwebs out of his head after three hours of sleep. He’s got a massive mug of java at his right hand and is sure it won’t be his last blast of caffeine this morning.
For a second this morning through the fog of sleep deprivation, Joe thought all of those yellow flags lying on the ground of the stadium last night was some form of a nightmare.
It wasn’t. The Bucs were flagged more than an undispiplined high school team. But as Donald Penn told Joe last night, a win is all that matters.
That’s the point made by Joe Henderson of the Tampa Tribune. Unlike college football, AP voters do not determine the beauty of wins. A win is a win.
I know it has been a while since the Bucs were on the national stage, but they really have shown the ability to play entertaining football from time to time. They have had long stretches of competence. They have entire games in which they have done many good things.
This time, they were simply good enough when they had to be to beat a bad football team. Head coach Raheem Morris likes to say there are no bad wins in the National Football League, so the Bucs will take their 24-17 victory over (still) winless Indianapolis and insist that, really, it was a thing of beauty.
“It wasn’t the prettiest win. It was a pretty ugly win. But it was a win,” said running back LeGarrette Blount, whose 35-yard touchdown run with 3:15 to play was the margin of victory as the Bucs had marked their return to “Monday Night Football,” with a sellout crowd at Ray-Jay.
Look, if the Bucs make the playoffs — no, Joe won’t break down the percentages of teams that start 3-1 that make the postseason but Joe’s gotta hunch it’s pretty good — not one person is going to wring hands over how the Bucs won on a Monday night in early October.
If the win was ugly, good. Learn from it. There are 12 more games to improve.
October 4th, 2011 at 9:01 am
Personally, I don’t think it was an ugly win. I think the Colts are a better football team than they are given credit for being.
They are decimated by injuries, but the young players being used as depth are doing decent…kind of reminds me of last year for us a little bit.
October 4th, 2011 at 9:08 am
@Pete, totally agree, Painter was actually pretty impressive. Really don’t know why the Colts panicked and signed Collins, Painter looks to understand their offensive concepts and he played fairly well. The refs got flag happy, after the first 6 or so both coaches should have gotten their teams to understand the refs were going to call EVERYTHING so be mindful, but they didn’t. We shot ourselves in our foot way to many times, but they were fixable errors, nothing that really couldn’t be chalked up to youth and the excitement of MNF.
October 4th, 2011 at 9:14 am
Being the youngest team in the league means that they are going to make more than their share of mistakes while learning to be pro football players, but the perfect situation is being able to make those mistakes and still make enough plays to win the games. With each win this team just gets more and more comfortable on the field and with experience the mistakes will diminish. If they can keep winning while they learn then by the time the playoffs roll around hopefully the mistakes will be few enough to make a serious playoff run.
October 4th, 2011 at 9:41 am
The UGLY:
– The big plays they gave up
– The penalties
– Josh making ANOTHER bad decision in the red zone (got lucky it was not another INT)
– Another slow start by the offense
– Mike Williams droped a couple balls
– Penalties
THE GOOD:
– O-Line
– D-Line
– Freeman the rest fo the night
– The two 4th down calls
– Parker
– Blount
– Benn
To single a few players out:
– McCoy is once again the most consistent disruptive force on the D-Line. The detractors need to wake up smell what McCoy is cooking!
– Clayborne, Bennett, and Bowers are becoming a fantastic rotation at DE.
– Clayborne is a beast who might end up with 10 sacks on sheer determination
– Foster is FAST becoming a major improvement over Ruud
– Lynch played better than Grimm has all year
– Talib needs to step it up
The secondary dropped THREE INTs……… The D-Line is starting to cause those throws so they need to start hanging on to them.
BOTTOM LINE: 3-1 tied for first!
Don’t take SF lightly, they are better than people think
October 4th, 2011 at 9:52 am
@Pete right on point this colts team is still pretty good despite not having Manning. I mean he is the difference of this team but its not like these guys are a terrible team. Too many ppl get caught up in the standings of teams and use that to define how good a team is. the colts are alot better than they get credit for
October 4th, 2011 at 10:27 am
@DieHard_Bob, you’re absolutely right when you said:
“Being the youngest team in the league means that they are going to make more than their share of mistakes while learning to be pro football players…”
Being the youngest team in the league also means that they’re going to have a tendency to play to the level of their competition. We’ve seen that in each of the first four games this year, which is both good and bad. It’s good, in that it means that they should be in each and every one of the games on this next murderer’s row stretch of seven games against teams with winning records.
It also means that for them to take the next step as professionals, they’ll need to learn how to step on the throats of weaker teams (such as last night’s opponent) when the opportunity presents itself, to save their big guns for the tougher games (like the upcoming games against the Saints and Packers).
They’re coming along nicely, though.
October 5th, 2011 at 2:06 am
I don’t know if Olson is holding back on unleashing Freeman because of his young recievers (as was mentioned by Jaws and Gru during the game), or what…but that was the sense I had watching this grueling game. Like we were being TOO cautious – playing not to lose, rather than learning to play to win.
I understand they didn’t want to “get it wrong” on MNF – but the television audience lost interest in the game – and Freeman seemingly never got in psynch. It’s a long season, so I hope we’re trying to be conservative to protect our playmakers.
The game plan as called offensively, certainly was designed to take advantage of the Colts weaknesses – but we sure didn’t make any “statements” in that game.