Did the Tampa Bay Buccaneers Tank the Second Half to Secure the First Overall Pick?

Breaking news: Tampa Bay has not been a good football team this year. After all, the team was in position to get to the first overall pick heading into the final game, needing only a loss and controlling their own destiny. Destiny, though, looked to be charting a different course with every errant Drew Brees throw to a Bucs defender. So maybe destiny needed a little push. You say tanking, I say not trying their best to win.

For what it’s worth, the official line out of Tampa Bay is that they weren’t tanking the final game. From Pat Yasinkas:

"Coach Lovie Smith and multiple players took offense to suggestions the Bucs might have tanked to make sure they secured the No. 1 pick. But the Bucs did squander a 13-point lead during a fourth quarter in which they were playing a lot of backups, so that’s going to lead to questions."

A bad team losing a big lead isn’t exactly unexpected. After all, Jacksonville jumped out to a 17-0 lead in the season opener at Philadelphia only to get run off the field in the second half, and I don’t think anyone would suspect tanking in Week 1. Tennessee, the team that would have gained the first pick with a Tampa win, had a 25-point lead against Cleveland earlier this year only to lose.

It’s the method by which they got there.

Let’s take Mike Evans, one of the true stars as a rookie wide receiver on this team. He had 5 catches and a touchdown in the first half, and the Saints could not cover him. He was on the field and looked perfectly healthy on the final snap of the half, right before the field goal that sent Tampa Bay to the locker room with an unlikely 20-7 lead.

He didn’t play a single snap in the second half. Not when holding the lead, and not once the Saints took the lead in the fourth quarter.

Either he was spending too much time with Manziel this weekend, or the coaching staff didn’t want to risk that he might make a big play.

Lovie Smith also offered this:

"“It had nothing to do with substitutions,” Smith said. “You look at how we played. To me, I’m going to go back, we’re moving the ball fairly well even in the second half. They played a lot better. We played a lot of guys the first half also. Vincent Jackson only played a few reps. That happened in the first half also, and the team we put on the football field had a chance to win right up until (the end). “Yeah, we didn’t have some of our best players there right in the end. But the guys we had in there we felt like we could move the ball and be able to win.” [emphasis ours]"

So let’s talk about that second half. Tampa Bay called runs, and more runs, even though they weren’t successful, playing with a shuffled line and the starting receivers out. In fact, they punted three straight times without attempting a pass. At the point where McCown threw an interception off Tavarres King’s hands, setting up the go-ahead touchdown, Tampa had 15 rushes for 35 yards, and 2 passes for 6 yards. They finished with 32 yards of offense, minus two holding penalties, for 12 net yards of offense the ENTIRE HALF.

It ended when Tampa Bay got the ball at the 17, down 1, just inside the two minute warning, and proceeded to give up a safety after a holding call, and two sacks.

Hey, I don’t think anyone would honestly fault a team for playing young players (of course, that might include Mike Evans) and sit veterans like Vincent Jackson and Logan Mankins. Offense can still be taken at Lovie Smith taking offense and insisting that the Tampa Bay was moving the ball in the second half. It looked like one team not trying to win, but the other refusing to take it (Brees threw two third quarter interceptions sandwiched around Tampa’s bad offense).

Football rarely involves a team trying to lose–and the draft isn’t like the NBA draft where one player can alter everything and the drop-off is huge (unless it’s the year Andrew Luck is coming out). As a prime example, the last team to “lose” the first overall pick in the final week with a win was Detroit in 2006. They had to settle for Calvin Johnson after Oakland took Jamarcus Russell.

For what it’s worth, Lovie Smith and GM Jason Licht have already planned on attending the Rose Bowl to scout both Marcus Mariota and Jameis Winston. You don’t want that trip to be ruined now. Sam Rosen added this hilarious nugget about Licht during the broadcast:

“He did tell us, in our chat with him on Friday, that he has scouted both of them live in person twice each, and Mariota is 0-2, and Jameis Winston is 2-0.”

Oh, please don’t just let that be the earliest smokescreen attempt of the silly season, but a GM who is grading on QB wins.

[GIF by Michael Shamburger, image via USA Today Sports]