The Ride Is Over For This Group Of Buccaneers Joe Henderson, The Tampa Tribune, published 17 November 2003 If you still believed before Sunday, stop. If you held out hope that these Bucs would flip the switch, pound the rock, or whatever they had deluded themselves into believing they were capable of doing, let it go. Please, in the name of sanity, stop calling the Bucs contenders. On a day when they swore the real Bucs would finally show up and begin their rightful ascent back to the top of the NFC ladder, all that happened was that the real Bucs showed up. They were listless, bone-headed and outplayed for much of the day. Their coach apologized afterward to the fans, and there should have been 53 ``amens'' in his locker room. The 20-13 loss to Green Bay completed their head-first charge into mediocrity, and there's no going back. They're in too deep a hole to dare utter the word ``playoff'' or even allow its syllables to form in the back of their minds. They're 4-dash-6 and trail in just about every relevant tiebreaker. Or, put another way, they are one game worse than the Cincinnati Bengals. The Super Bowl champion that stood on the podium last January in San Diego was another team. That team would not have lost a game like this one, when Brett Favre came into the Bucs' house and torched them for, get this, 92 yards! Ninety-two yards! You hold Favre to 92 yards passing, you win, right? Ah, but not the Bucs. Not these Bucs. The Bucs bottled up Favre, so the Packers ran for 190 yards and left town with a piece of the rock. Ah yes, the rock. It was supposed to be better this week because the rock re-emerged at One Buc Place, reminding everyone of the work ethic that made the Bucs champions a year ago. So much for that. So much for the recuperative powers of a piece of granite. The rock-solid Bucs lost because Green Bay drove 98 yards through the heart of their defense for the winning touchdown. A 98-yard, 17-play drive that took 9:42 to complete, and if there ever was a fitting epitaph to the decline and fall of a Super Bowl champion, you just saw it. You saw a team that was inexplicably flat for much of a game that had ``playoff survival'' stamped on it from the beginning. During one sequence that should be shown on Comedy Central instead of NFL Films, the Bucs committed penalties on three consecutive plays. Holding. False start. False start. Kenyatta Walker got his obligatory 15-yard face-mask penalty, then later suggested the flag flew because officials have it in for him. ``They're watching me on every play,'' he said. ``I definitely put myself in this hole.'' Kenyatta shouldn't be so hard on himself. There's plenty of room down in that hole. Plenty of room at rock bottom. Jon Gruden referred afterward to a ``lack of concentration'' and added, ``we looked to be in one of those funks, in one of those dazes from a horror movie.'' That much was on display for everyone to see, although Gruden certainly described it well. What's a little less obvious is exactly how the heck that can happen. They had to win this game to have any realistic hope of the playoffs, but there were only flashes of what once made the Bucs a truly great defense. Where were the defenders flying to the ball? Where was the ability to stop Green Bay on third down? On the winning drive, the Packers were five of five on third- and fourth-down conversions. A team that set the NFL record for consecutive games with a sack couldn't put Favre on the ground once. But this was an equal-opportunity splat. Outside of running back Thomas Jones, the offense essentially was inept. Jones had 134 yards rushing on nine tries. The remainder of the Bucs, in 40 tries, had 151 yards. They were 1-for-11 on third down. Brad Johnson was sacked three times and threw two interceptions. Shall we go on? Gruden promised changes before next Monday's game against the Giants, but there's only so much he can do besides, you know, dropping a rock on several heads. The real changes will come after the season. There will be very little incentive to keep this team together. You may be seeing the final six weeks for the core of this team, and it has been quite a ride. It's hard to imagine there being another game like Sunday's at Ray- Jay, where Warren Sapp chases Favre around with playoff hopes on the line. The reality of life in the NFL is that you keep a championship group together as long as you can, then move on. The moving vans are backing up to One Buc. The only thing left is to dissect what has gone wrong and wonder what Gruden and Rich McKay - well, maybe McKay - will do to fix it. Thinking about the future beats holding out hope for this season. If you still want to believe in something, believe in that.