No excuse for sitting Alstott at key time Gary Shelton, The St.Petersburg Times, published 24 November 1997 Somebody finally stopped Mike Alstott Sunday. The shame of it is, it was his coaches. Forget everything else. Forget the fumbles and the cold and the missed field goals. Forget the missed tackles and the calls the referees made and the calls they didn't. Forget the mistakes that occurred beforehand and the ones that occurred after. This was the game, and nothing else mattered. Two minutes left, and the game was there to be won. The Bucs had the ball, third and 2 on the Bears' 41, crunch time. Around Tampa Bay, we know who Captain Crunch is. He wears No. 40. This was where the Bucs should have turned the game over to Alstott. They had two plays, they needed 2 yards, and they should have looked at the Bears and said "too bad." This time, there should have been a real warning to the two-minute warning: Here comes the A-train. Instead, Alstott was on the sideline, hands on his hips, watching. Can someone explain this to me? The clock is stopped because of the two-minute warning, and the coaches talk it over, and they decide their best chance is without Alstott? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Alstott had a fumble earlier in the game, a victim, you might say, of the Sports Illustrated Page 40 Jinx. He had only 2.6 yards per carry. The Bucs managed only 35 yards rushing on the day, and 13 of those came on a scramble by Trent Dilfer. But as someone wise once said: What do you want, the truth or statistics? The truth is this. Alstott is the best player the Bucs have on offense, and something is terribly wrong with a scheme that does not have him on the field for the biggest play of the game. Alstott should have gotten the ball on third down, and if he wasn't successful, he should have gotten it on fourth down. Instead, the Bucs decided to throw, and Dilfer's third-down pass was incomplete. Alstott did catch a pass on fourth down, but was inches short of the first. Still, don't you like the Bucs' chances if Alstott gets two shots at the Bears defense? "You can't second-guess yourself," Bucs coach Tony Dungy said afterward. "We had time to talk about it, and we called what we thought was best for the situation. If we ran and didn't make it, you could second-guess that." In the most important plays of a game, however, a team needs to go with its strength. A fastball pitcher throws a fastball. A heavyweight boxer throws a left hook. The Bucs should have thrown Alstott at the Bears. Twice. "We talked about a lot of things," offensive coordinator Mike Shula said. "We felt we had a real good play in that situation. We just didn't execute it." The thing is, I'm sure they called a swell play, and it is just rotten luck the Bears managed to overcome their amazement quickly enough to cover every receiver. But at that point, the most important part of the afternoon was to move the ball 72 inches. Who better than Alstott to accomplish that? It should be noted that Alstott would not complain. He kept talking about how he should have picked up the yardage on fourth down. How he shouldn't have fumbled early. But you got the feeling he wouldn't have minded getting two opportunities to run through the Bears. After all, he is 6-for-6 on third and 1 this season. When the plan is to go for it on fourth down, isn't third and 2 the same thing? There are times the Bucs seem to suffer from vapor lock and forget their own weapons. It happened in the loss to Minnesota, and it happened again against the Bears. Sometimes, the Bucs seem to get so involved in packages and percentages, they forget about people and production. Consider this: Alstott touched the ball three times on the Bucs' first five plays. He did not touch the ball the remainder of the first half. In fact, it was 27 plays later before Alstott was used as anything more than a blocker. Seems to me that if a game plan includes going 26 straight plays without Alstott, the Bears must have a hand in drawing it up. Now, consider this. On the afternoon, the Bucs ran 27 plays inside Chicago territory. Alstott touched it twice. Twice. Okay, three times if you count a 14-yard screen pass Alstott took to the Bears' 5 that was negated by penalty, but that only fuels the argument he should have had the ball more. Every time the Bucs got close to the Bears' 30, they tried to turn into a passing team. Those, we can presume, were real good plays that just weren't executed, too. As much as anything, this beat the Bucs Sunday. They lost sight of their personality, their strength. They fell behind by 10 points, and they acted as if they were behind by 24. After Chicago got a field goal and a touchdown, the Bucs threw the ball 32 times and ran it 17. Alstott finished with only seven carries, only two catches. In the end, Tampa Bay didn't lose because the field was on ice. It lost because its fullback was.