The unique perspective and provocative opinions of Joe O’Neill
Sports Shorts
The Bucs’ 26-3 loss to the New York Jets last Sunday was a new low for a team that refuses to stop digging after finding itself in a deep, competitive hole to begin the season. That’s because a bad team in a rebuilding mode is now regressing – most notably rookie quarterback/franchise savior Josh Freeman. He telegraphs his throws; he’s inaccurate; and he looks confused. The upside is that he passes on excuse-making and is candid about his poor performances. Another down side is that this is the only upside right now.
Rich Gannon, the CBS booth analyst for the Bucs-Jets game was about as critical of the Bucs as network protocol permits. He thought what he had seen two days earlier at a Bucs’ practice presaged a flat, out-of-sync effort on game day. “We watched their practice on Friday, and I wasn’t at all impressed,” said Gannon who used to play for Jon Gruden and was the opposing quarterback when the Gruden-coached Bucs beat the Oakland Raiders in Super Bowl XXXVII. Gannon avoided saying the Bucs were poorly-coached, work ethic-challenged and embarrassingly unprepared, per se, but it was obvious that’s what he meant.
USF has been rushing around the past two weeks trying to expedite passports for its players, coaches and band members before heading for Toronto to play Northern Illinois in the International Bowl on Jan. 2. It’s hardly a normal bowl-game detail. Frankly, the best way for the Bulls to have coped would have been to not fall apart at the end of the season — again — and consequently wind up, from USF’s standpoint, in the most unappealing of the 34 bowl games.
Kudos to USF for cutting a deal with Apple to provide its student athletes — and they number more than 450 – with MacBook laptops to help them keep up when they’re on the road. And as the Big East’s most southern school – by a lot – Bulls’ athletes spend more than their share of time away from campus. USF also scored favorable national publicity when the laptop story was picked up by Sports Illustrated and CNN.