A once-great defense has another last-minute collapse for the Bucs Eleven players on defense. Not a single saviour among them. That's what you look for, right? A hero. A vanquisher. A beast. When the outcome of a game and perhaps a season is staring you in the face, you look for one star to make one play to change a team's fortune. And the 11 players on the Bucs defense failed on Sunday. Again. For the third time in the past six weeks, Tampa Bay's defense could not make a single game-saving play when it mattered. It couldn't stop the Falcons in overtime in early October. It couldn't slow the Chiefs in overtime in early November. And on Sunday, it could not thwart the 49ers in the final 41 seconds of a 23-20 loss. "It's in our hands," Lavonte David said. "As a defensive captain of this football team, I'm out there. I'm not doing enough. Everybody is not doing enough. So, whatever it is, we have to dig deep and find it." For much of the last half-century, this franchise survived on defense. A DNA test would reveal a family tree that combines Nasty on one side and Vicious on the other. Start with Lee Roy Selmon. Continue with Derrick Brooks and Warren Sapp and John Lynch and Ronde Barber. Defense is ingrained in Tampa Bay's soul. For crying out loud, how many teams have a defensive coordinator enshrined in its exclusive Ring of Honor? And yet the Bucs are 4-6 today instead of 7-3 because the defense failed in the final minutes of three games. "You've got to finish ballgames," Todd Bowles said. "Guys get a chance to play, they've got to come in and execute. You can't play hard and not play smart at the end. We've got to play smarter football. There's nothing wrong with how hard we're playing, how tough we're playing, but we've got to finish games. "We're making too many mistakes at the end." At times this season, the defense has played a soft zone with the idea of keeping the ball in front of defenders. On San Francisco's final drive Sunday, the Bucs switched to a more aggressive man-to-man scheme, but defensive backs still gave receivers huge cushions. Considering the 49ers needed only 30-35 yards to move into field goal range, it was a curious and fatal plan of attack. San Francisco picked up 26 yards on three completions in 18 seconds. With 23 seconds remaining and the 49ers at the Tampa Bay 39, the Bucs blitzed with seven rushers. When Brock Purdy got off a quick pass to Jauan Jennings in the flat, the closest defender was more than 5 yards away. Antoine Winfield Jr. closed on Jennings but missed the tackle, allowing him to gain 13 yards. That was, essentially, the death knell. "When we got in the two-minute situation, it felt like we played a little soft, a little conservative. That's players-wise, not the calls," said safety Jordan Whitehead. "It was really just one-on-one matchups. That last drive we were in man-to-man. Everybody's got to do their job. The DBs have got to cover, and the D-line has got to get there. "You can't get more aggressive than man-to-man. That's mano y mano. That's not the call, that's on us." To be fair, the secondary was depleted by game's end. One corner, Jamel Dean, has been out for a few weeks with a hamstring pull and the other, Zyon McCollum, left in the fourth quarter with his own hamstring problem. That means, with the game on the line, the two cornerbacks (Josh Hayes and Tyrek Funderburk) had four career starts and no interceptions between them. Obviously, that's not the ideal circumstance, but it's also part of life in the NFL. The Bucs still had Vita Vea on the line. They had David at linebacker. They had Winfield and Whitehead at safety. They just needed somebody to make a game-saving play. Instead, Purdy did the same thing Kirk Cousins and Patrick Mahomes had done to the Bucs. Excluding a spike to stop the clock, those three quarterbacks went 12-for-12 for 160 yards and one touchdown on game-winning drives. That works out to a 146.5 passer rating with the game on the line. I asked David if there was any common thread to the three late collapses. "Nope. We just have to get off the field. That's it," he said. "We just have to make plays. It's very disappointing. Like you said, we hold ourselves to a high standard, and we haven't been upholding to our standards and it's very disappointing. All 11 guys have to play better." John Romano, Tampa Bay Times, published 11 November 2024