THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, February 5, 1996 TAG: 9602050109
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JIM DUCIBELLA, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 127 lines
Sam Wyche promises that his speech at the Norfolk Sports Club Jamboree Tuesday night will take the audience inside the huddle, onto the sidelines, through the locker room door. He'll show them what it means to be an NFL coach.
It will mean taking the good with the bad, tasting the honey and the vinegar. Wyche was fired recently by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, despite guiding the team to a 7-9 record, its most competitive in 14 seasons. It was the first time since 1982 the Buccaneers hadn't lost 10 or more games. And it was the second consecutive season in his four-year tenure that the Bucs' record had improved.
``We were two field goals from going to the playoffs,'' Wyche said Saturday night. ``Had we finished 9-7, my understanding is that we would have qualified for the playoffs. You go wide-right a couple of times, you're a bum and it's `Get out.' You go down the middle and you're a hero.
``This team, to be frank, was awful when I first got here, one of the worst I'd ever seen in my life. It was not going to happen fast and I don't think there was any other coach who could have made it happen faster. This team might have moved faster had a couple of players developed faster, but they've got a lot of good players now.
``We had to pay the dues and now somebody else (Tony Dungy) is going to celebrate the improved results. In a way, that's OK. The team was awful when we found it. It wasn't awful when we left.''
Wyche spent 23 seasons in the NFL as a player, assistant and head coach. He loves the game. He knows the game. And it isn't the same one he worked his way up from the bottom to play, starting with the Continental League's Wheeling Ironmen in 1966, two years before he signed a free-agent contract with Paul Brown's expansion Cincinnati Bengals.
``The game has certainly changed and coaches have to adjust,'' he said. ``Free agency makes for an entirely different job description. The players union has become much more of a factor.
``You have to level the playing field between the extraordinary player, who may be cruising a little because he just signed a contract, and a lot of the young players. Instead of thinking they've got a lot to learn, many feel like they've made it once they've signed a contract.
``The players are all bigger, all faster, all stronger. They're attuned to their potential to play pro football early in their careers, as opposed to waking up one morning and saying, `Gee whiz, I might get a chance to play.' ''
Despite all that, and television and agents and fewer draft choices and the fact that he was fired by the Cincinnati Bengals just three years after guiding them to Super Bowl XXIII, he calls himself ``the luckiest guy I know.''
``I've been in three Super Bowls, and I don't see how anyone could call that a raw deal,'' he said. ``I played in one (Super Bowl VII, with the Redskins), coached in one as a position coach (Super Bowl XVI, under Bill Walsh at San Francisco) and I was a head coach in one. Dan Reeves is the only active coach who has done that. I feel lucky.''
But he doesn't argue when someone suggests that he may have been a victim of the league's collective-bargaining agreement and salary cap.
With veteran Craig Erickson at quarterback, the Bucs were 6-10 in 1993. Their quarterback of the future, Trent Dilfer, spent almost all of that season on the bench, watching and learning. Last offseason, with Erickson's and Dilfer's hefty contracts making personnel improvement in other areas impossible under the cap, the Bucs traded Erickson to Indianapolis and installed Dilfer as starting quarterback.
Clearly, he wasn't ready. Dilfer started all 16 games, but Wyche pulled him four times. Dilfer had the NFL's lowest quarterback rating (60.1), fumbled a team-high nine times (losing four) and had just four touchdown passes, 18 interceptions.
Wyche would have preferred to bring him along the old-fashioned way, allowing him to wait on the sidelines until ready. Instead, he was forced to go with Dilfer, then forced out of his job.
``I wouldn't be the first guy to feel that pinch,'' he said. ``We don't know that (Wyche wouldn't have been fired had Dilfer played better). Trent will be a good quarterback. I feel for the other (assistant) coaches who are out there looking for jobs. An entire coaching staff was fired, not just me. They have families, kids in school, a wife who maybe has a job. Their entire lives are disrupted.''
In recent years, even the league office has begun to cry over the NFL's lack of top-caliber young quarterbacks. Wyche sees no simple solution to the problem - but he does offer a possibility.
``The solutions are at negotiating time, such as getting players at that position to bargain for a six-year deal (after which they'd be unrestricted free agents),'' he said.
``That would give them time to develop and have some life after they develop, as opposed to just about the time they've been trained, developed, gone through the heartache and maybe a coach has lost his job, some other team reaps the benefits.
``The only other solution would be one where the player was sort of a like a redshirt in college, or where he wouldn't count against you, or maybe a portion of (his salary) would count against the cap. Maybe a flat figure that all quarterbacks were salaried under the cap; maybe $1 million or so.''
Almost certainly, Wyche will become a network broadcaster this season. He has had discussions with NBC, ABC and Fox, with only TNT at present uninterested. Such a career shift presents the 51-year-old Atlanta native with a vexing dilemma. Wyche has been an outspoken critic of the media and its sometimes negative posture on the games and players. Now, he'll work with them, not before them.
``The biggest difference in the media has happened in the last 10 years,'' he said. ``In general - not total - the media is a lot more critical. Somebody's got to be blamed for the loss, not congratulated for the victory.
``In individual sports, you still see the victor being congratulated. The golf-tournament winner, the tennis player. He, in turn, compliments the opponent. In team sports, it's who missed the tackle as opposed to who made him miss the tackle. That part bothers me, because I go back into the locker room with these guys and I know how they feel when they miss the tackle.
``And, there are a few isolated cases of media people who go after coaches, players. They become very vindictive and actually boast about it - that they're going to get somebody fired. I've seen it, people who decided at some point that that was it, it was time to get this guy fired.''
Wyche says he can't be hypercritical of the game and those against whom he once competed. He says he has told network officials not to expect any muckraking.
``I will be frank and honest,'' he insists. ``I might say, `Well, that decision turned out to be pretty bad, I know, and if he had another go at it, he'd probably go another way. But here's how that operates. You've got 45 seconds, the crowd is screaming. Put the fans in the shoes of the coach and make them think, rather than them automatically assuming, `Hey, you're a bum, you made the wrong decision.' '' ILLUSTRATION: Photo
Sam Wyche says the Bucs were awful when he got there, but a lot
better when he got fired.
by CNB