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Rick Stroud, The St.Petersburg Times, published 6 November 1995
Santana Dotson fell on the fumble late in the first half and had one extremely natural urge: Get up and try to score before surrendering the football to the Bucs' offense.
"I wish I had a little room to pick it up and run with it myself," Dotson said. "All we can do is just get the turnovers and the offense will handle the rest."
But something is missing from the Bucs' offense - points. Dotson's fumble recovery of a mishandled snap by Oilers quarterback Chris Chandler at the Houston 36-yard line with Tampa Bay trailing 9-7 gave the Bucs a terrific chance to take a lead and momentum into the locker room at halftime.
But the Bucs were forced to settle for Michael Husted's 38-yard field-goal attempt, which he pushed wide right.
Every week, it's the same story. The Bucs' defense fights hard all day and keeps opponents out of the end zone, but the offense flounders and rarely scores more than one touchdown.
Even Tampa Bay's lone score Sunday was a fluke. Dilfer ducked out of a certain sack and scrambled to his left for a 21-yard touchdown run, picking up a block from tight end Jackie Harris that sprung him to the end zone.
The Bucs were held to a season-low 155 yards - marking the fifth straight game Tampa Bay's offensive output has decreased. The Bucs rolled up 310 yards at Carolina, 299 yards against Cincinnati, 263 yards against Minnesota and 258 yards last week against Atlanta. But the defense wasn't totally blameless Sunday at the Astrodome.
Tampa Bay allowed the Oilers to smother the ball for 34 plays and 18:50 on just two field-goal drives in the first half. By halftime, Houston owned a 21:11 to 8:49 advantage in time of possession. "It's nobody's fault but our own," Dotson said. "That's going back to getting off the field. We have to win the way we've been doing on first and second downs. Today, particularly in the first half, they had too many third and shorts. It's easy then to keep us on our heels. They can run or throw quick passes in the flats. I think that hurt us today.
The main thing is we didn't come up with the big plays and the turnovers that we're accustomed to."
The defense also allowed Houston to convert 9 of 16 third downs. "Anyone who looks at this game and thinks the defense did their job, I think they're fooling themselves," safety John Lynch said. "We didn't do what we needed to do. They grinded the ball on us at will. They outplayed us. We had bad tackles - I made a bad tackle on my part. It just wasn't a good day for us."
But for the fifth time this season the Bucs held an opponent to 19 points or less, normally good enough to win.
"As a defense, we'll take care of our part of it and they'll take care of theirs," Dotson said. "This team has been winning for a month. We dropped the last couple of games and that's not the way we wanted to go into the off week. But when you look at the big picture, we're still a half game or one game out of first place."
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