Pinch-hitting today on WDAE-AM 620 for the dean of Tampa Bay sports radio, “The Big Dog,” Steve Duemig, Bobby Fenton lit into the Bucs during his monologue and skinned Bucs players for their play in recent weeks of what is now a grotesque nine-game losing streak.

The Bucs aren’t just losing during this streak. They are getting pistol-whipped. And last Sunday’s loss to the Stinking Panthers was the last straw for Fenton.

Joe was somewhat taken aback at how unnerved Fenton was with the Bucs’ lack of effort last weekend.

“They extended a giant middle finger to the people and the fans who care about this team,” Fenton said. “For it to happen over and over. They know their coach’s job is on the line and you figured they will play halfway decent, surely these guys won’t allow themselves to be embarrassed yet again. Certainly pride has to kick in with the coach’s job on the line, right?

“They extended a giant middle finger to all of us. I have never felt this way. I was actually rooting late for Carolina to score more, to score on these SOBs. I had that much contempt. It made me want to spit in the faces of half of these guys.

“Maybe this wouldn’t be happening if Earnest Graham was around? I have never taken some sick pleasure in the other team running up touchdowns. I was disgusted.

“We all work hard all week and then put our money down to watch others bust their @ss and they pull that?

“I’m not going to feel sorry for Raheem Morris. He has a $2 million a year contract through next year. It may not be all his fault, but if this is what having the team looks like, my gosh, I’d hate to see what it would be like if he didn’t have the team.

“I wish I had the power to fire two-thirds of this team.”

Joe doesn’t often watch Monday Night Football on BSPN for one reason: Chucky.

Joe doesn’t hate Chucky, but does hate him as a broadcast analyst.

Whereas Mike Tirico is solid (Joe misses him doing college football games) and Ron “Jaws” Jaworski is just about unmatched in his research with the lone exception of Mike Mayock, Chucky is simply full of it. Full of it being blather and nonsense.

Every freaking player is a Pro Bowler. Every friggin’ player is having his bust made for Canton. To hear Chucky describe every coach, the guy’s last name must be “Lombardi.”

In Chucky’s first season as a Monday Night Football announcer, Joe threw in the towel when he said Bill Callahan was the best players’ coach he knew.

That bordered on an outright lie, not that Chucky would ever stoop to such a level (sarcasm alert). Callahan was the target of a mutiny when he coached the Raiders. Yeah, real players’ coach.

It seems the voice of reason, the great Phil Mushnick, has had his fill of Chucky as well. Though the long-time New York Post columnist has taken many a potshot at Chucky over the past couple of months, he totally hammered Chucky recently, not just saying Chucky is full of it, but suggests Chucky does little research and in fact doesn’t pay attention to the game he is analyzing.

Late in the third, after 49ers running back Frank Gore was tackled for a loss on a sweep to his right, Gruden took it as cue to make a short story long — and exaggerated:

“Hard to get the ball outside in the running game against this Pittsburgh Steelers’ defense. You’ve all heard about settin’ the edge, settin’ the edge. These outside linebackers [Jason] Worilds and [LaMarr] Woodley do not let the ball outside.”

On the next play, Gore ran around the right side for an 11-yard gain.

It’s a pretty interesting read on how network broadcast types really expose themselves by not doing research, not paying attention to games but constantly yapping to try to cover up their mistakes and distract viewers.

When Chucky is off Team Glazer’s payroll in a couple of weeks, Joe sure hopes he gets a coaching job, that way Joe won’t always have to go to a bar to watch Monday Night Football. At most bars, the audio is inaudible, which is a good thing when Chucky’s spreading the schtick thick, trying to impress a future boss/general manager.

There has been a lot of surprising things about this Bucs season, and as far as Joe can see all of them have been surprisingly awful.

Take the sordid franchise record the Bucs are on the brink of setting. Then the (once) surprising seal-clubbing by the likes of Jacksonville, Dallas and Carolina, twice in fact.

But for Pat Yasinskas of ESPN, a giant surprise has been the implosion of Bucs quarterback Josh Freeman, so he penned in a leaguewide look at quarterbacks.

Worst surprise: Josh Freeman, Buccaneers. I truly believed we’d see greatness out of Freeman this year. His 2010 season, his first as a starter, was filled with all sorts of promise. But 2011 has been a disaster. Freeman deserves some of the blame, no doubt. But his supporting cast has been dismal and that’s made him look even worse. The Bucs have to do something dramatic or else they’re going to ruin this kid.

Can’t argue with Yasinskas. Now part of the reason for Freeman’s struggles, let’s be frank, he’s been hurt a lot more than he has been healthy. As Yasinskas points out, receivers unable to get open didn’t help either. Also, the Bucs rank third in the NFL in dropped passes. But no one but Freeman decided to rifle passes into double- and triple-coverage in order to force a ball to Kellen Winslow.

Whoever the coach is next year, if Freeman struggles, so too will the Bucs.

NBC Sports NFL guru and curator of ProFootballTalk.com Mike Florio breaks down the head coaches with the hottest rear ends in the league. Raheem ranks Raheem Morris No. 3 and explains in this NBCSports.com video.

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On what surely will be an excursion devoted to procuring a quality elephant, Davin Joseph is heading to Hawaii for the 2012 Pro Bowl.

Tapping all the drama they could muster, the AFC and NFC teams were announced last night on NFL Network. Joseph is the lone Buccaneer on the rosters. Yes, Connor Barth got hosed.

It’ll be Joseph’s second Pro Bowl; he scored a visit after the 2008 season when he was named an alternate. For that trip, Joseph paid for his mom, Jeremy Trueblood, Donald Penn and Aaron Sears to join him.

Joseph surely earned his honor and managed to stay healthy this season. Joe wonders what the right side of the Bucs line might look like with a true beast playing alongside Joseph.

Sunday when the Bucs face the Dixie Chicks, the players may very well be playing for Raheem Morris’ job.

They also will be playing to avoid setting a nauseating record.

If the Bucs give up 25 points, points out Woody Cummings of the Tampa Tribune, the 2011 Bucs will go down in franchise history as allowing the most points in a season.

All the Bucs have to do is give up 25 points to the Falcons in their season finale Sunday in Atlanta to set a standard for points allowed. The current mark was set by the 1986 team, which allowed 473 points and 6.0 yards per play, another franchise mark that’s in danger of being eclipsed this weekend.

The Bucs (4-11) are allowing an average of 29.9 points and 6.2 yards per play this season. The desire to keep from setting standards will fuel the play of at least some Tampa Bay defensive players.

“If something like that doesn’t motivate you, then I don’t know what it’s going to take,” Bennett said. “That’s a negative record. But that shouldn’t have to be a motivator.”

The current Bucs record for most points allowed in a season for was during the immortal Leeman Bennett era. And he paid for that record with his head coaching job.

At the very least, such a rancid mark would get a defensive coordinator in serious hot water. The current defensive coordinator just happens to be Bucs embattled coach Raheem Morris.

When a team sets a record for most points allowed in franchise history, all excuses like no offseason, too young of a team, injuries et al, are simply thrown out the window. Shoot, two of those young players people try to make excuses for on this team simply happen to be two of the best players on defense, Adrian Clayborn and Da’Quan Bowers. If anything, youth is helping this team.

And many Bucs fans, including those working behind a microphone, actually had the gall to make Barrett Ruud out to be a scapegoat. If anything, he’s a martyr.

Bucs beat writer eye-RAH! Kaufman, of The Tampa Tribune, talked about Team Glazer's feelings on WDAE-AM 620 today.

Speaking with confidence that Raheem Morris will coach his last game as a Buccaneer on Sunday, Tampa Tribune beat writer eye-RAH! Kaufman dared to speak for Team Glazer during a radio interview this afternoon.

Kaufman told Rock Riley on WDAE-AM 620 that Team Glazer wants Raheem to return but they just can’t do it.

“At this point, [the Glazers] feel their hand is forced,” Kaufman said. “They’re not competitive. They’re the worst team in football right now. Nobody can argue that.”

Kaufman went on to say that the notion that Team Glazer won’t invest heavily in a new coach is ludicrous, citing their track record, including paying Chucky’s massive salary for the last three seasons while he plays talking head. “It’s not so easy to say cheap, cheap, cheap, they won’t spend,” Kaufman said.

Kaufman said he believes Team Glazer will target a high-profile guy to be the Bucs next head coach and Mark Dominik could become a “casualty of war” if they hired a guy like Bill Cowher that might want complete control.

These are interesting times for Bucs fans. Some would say the franchise is at a crossroads.

The Bucs are in the midst of a grotesque nine-game tailspin with no end in sight, one that very well may cost embattled Bucs coach Raheem Morris his job.

One reason why Morris may be jettisoned is struggling ticket sales, which judging by the outcry of angry fans begging for Morris’ head on a platter would drop significantly if he returns in 2012.

The lack of ticket sales was indirectly touched upon by Peter King of Sports Illustrated today in an interesting answer to why the Bengals — in a playoff race themselves — cannot sell out a home game.

“Love the column, keep up the great work! Why do you think the Bengals can’t fill their stadium in the midst of a playoff run? You spent time in Cincy – do the fans just not care that much for Bengals football? I vaguely remember in the late 80’s it was a very difficult place to play, the jungle and all. The stadium is in a great spot on the river…are the fans just gone given how bad the nineties were to them? Seems odd compared to a city like Detroit who went through a similar dry spell and are now packing their stadium.”
— Josh, of Chicago

My gut feeling is they have Mike Brown fatigue. The fans don’t trust Brown is doing everything he can to build a winner (Carson Palmer didn’t either), and many are staying away in protest until Brown sells the team. Which, by the way, will happen on the 12th of Never.

This is a very, very interesting point for Joe.

Bad, good or indifferent, right or wrong, many Bucs fans are suspicious of Team Glazer (partially because of that damned English kickball team). This paranoia is currently whipped up daily by certain sports radio hosts that, in so many words, short of throwing open the gates of the football stadium on Dale Mabry Highway to the masses for free, suggest Team Glazer is evil incarnate and fans should start looking for another NFL team to support.

Joe simply doesn’t get that rationale at all. The NFL is a business and it isn’t the Florida State League where tickets are next to nothing and hot dogs and beer are sold for $1, much less a beer league softball team playing in a park in south Tampa for anyone to watch free.

Tickets to NFL games are expensive. They exist so the owners can make cash. That isn’t going to change anytime in the near future in any NFL market.

It’s called “capitalism.” No different than plunking down $70+ to see Van Halen. Or taking out a mortgage to go to Disney World.

This “fatigue” that King speaks of may be real in this market, and a potential real problem for Team Glazer. Joe is convinced that one reason the Rays don’t draw is because that scumbag Vince Naimoli so poisoned this market, that it turned a good chunk of the populace off baseball for good.

No matter the Rays making the playoffs three times since Naimoli was forced by Major League Baseball to give up control of the team, including a World Series appearance, the Rays are still swimming upstream from the damage Naimoli inflicted upon this market.

Joe has lived in a couple of areas where the locals had “fatigue” for owners. The first was Bill Bidwill, he of the 59 years without a playoff win. When anyone tries to tell Joe how Satanic they think Team Glazer is, Joe just laughs and asks them if they have ever heard the name “Bill Bidwill?”

Fans in St. Louis literally just gave up on Bidwill and, when he announced he was looking to move (sort of a shot across the bow in hopes of a new stadium,) it was met with a big shrug of the shoulders and applause in some circles.

When Joe worked in Chicago, Blackhawks owner Bill Wirtz did his best to kill hockey in the Second City, and very nearly did. Only the diehard facepainters went to games; the Blackhawks were easily the fifth rung on the sports ladder in Chicago and maybe even sixth below the University of Illinois and Notre Dame basketball teams.

The local AHL club there nearly drew as many fans as the Blackhawks it had gotten so bad.

Only until Wirtz died did the city of Chicago embrace the NHL once again as it had for decades.

Combined with the lack of Bucs ticket sales (mostly due to the economy, let’s not be naive here), the outcry for the ouster of Morris and the prevalent if not misguided suspicion of Team Glazer, the Bucs may very well be at a crossroads next week. That is the corner Team Glazer finds itself painted into. If the unpopular Morris and his assistants are retained, Joe fears the Bucs are on the verge of being a victim of “fatigue,” and it will take years if not decades to recover.

We live in an era where people can change allegiances at the drop of a hat. We live in a fast-food, instant-gratification, fantasy football, free agency mindset. A growing segment of sports fans demand change now, or they will change their emotions (and dollars) to another team, via sports bars and DirecTV.

Sadly, this mindset is allergic to how Team Glazer is trying to build a lasting winner, the same way the Packers and Steelers have.

Just from listening to sports radio and reading various blogs and message boards in the Tampa Bay area, Joe can surmise that Raheem Morris has surpassed Rick Scott as the most loathed man in Florida.

These are tough times for Morris, who may be in his final week as Bucs coach, as the team is in the midst of a gruesome tailspin.

But Ryan Wilson of CBSSports.com has Morris’ back. Wilson appears to be of the mind that Morris should return for his final year of his current contract.

Morris is right: it’s not just about coaching. It’s a confluence of events that have led the Bucs to this point. Just like last season, when the culmination sound football and a lot of luck led to a 10-6 record. Maybe Tampa isn’t a 4-11 team 16 weeks into the 2011 season. But perhaps they weren’t a 10-win outfit a year ago, either. More likely: they’re somewhere in between. An average football team that had a run on good luck in ’10 and a run on bad luck in ’11. It happens.

But the NFL is, as they say, a bottom-line business. Which means blaming ill-fated bounces for your plight won’t help you keep your job. And that brings us back to our original point: Morris, in all likelihood has a week left in his current gig.

But it may be too late. The season ticket base has been shrinking for a few years and if Morris comes back next year, as much as fans have turned on him, it wouldn’t shock Joe if the season ticket base is halved.

After firing their first two coordinators, changing their defense and then deciding to shun free agency, the Bucs’ plan for this regime became very straightforward.

In short, the goal was to stay young while building around Josh Freeman and loading up on top-tier draft picks on the defensive line, and all that would happen while the coaching staff grew together, players would gel, leadership would evolve, and time would show what young players could play and dictate what holes to fill via future free agency and drafts.

It sure seemed like the plan — agree with it or not — was on the mark after the Bucs starting winning at the end of 2009, went 10-6 last year, and came out with impressive wins against New Orleans and Atlanta this season en route to a 4-2 record. (Imagine that, 4-2 after no OTAs.)

Then the wheels fell off and players stopped playing hard and clearly tuned out their coaching. But does this mean the plan itself was bad, or just the coaching? Joe has written many times that the failures of the coaching staff far outweigh the problems with the plan and the talent level.

But Bucs beat writer Rick Stroud, of the St. Pete Times, seems to have a different view, so he said on The Dan Sileo Show today.

“When you watch what’s gone on, you realize that the plan was never a great one,” Stroud said.

Joe realizes the plan vs. coaching debate is likely to rage on through the Bucs offseason. But Joe really doesn’t get how one can blame a plan on players quitting on their coaches and a team collectively being unresponsive to its coaching.

As Joe has written numerous times, the essence of coaching is to get the most out of your players regardless of their talent. It’s 100 percent clear that Raheem Morris has not done that.

What’s not clear is that “the plan” — the one since mid-2009 — is bad. Have there been bad decisions? Absolutely. But Joe’s hardly sold on the Bucs’ plan being worth throwing overboard with the coaching staff.

Back on the WDAE-AM 620 airwaves after a Christmas vacation, former Bucs guard Ian Beckles came out swinging today with a barrage of uppercuts for Bucs players, coaches, and management.

One jab particularly interesting to Joe was directed toward LeGarrette Blount, who Beckles thinks is a second-rate football player.

“Let’s stop saying that LeGarrette Blount is good,” Beckles said. “You can’t be a one-dimensional running back that fumbles.”

Beckles also defended his statement saying Bount’s off the field on third down, can’t block and isn’t good in short yardage.

There’s no denying Beckles is on the money with the fumbling take. That’s never acceptable, and Blount couldn’t blame a wet ball Saturday in Carolina. At least that’s correctable.

However, Joe disagrees with Beckles overall because Joe believes Greg Olson simply hasn’t figured out how to use Blount. He’s shown he can catch the ball and do damage in space, yet they don’t dial that those calls very much. Blount’s got more yards per catch than Kellen Winslow.

And Joe surely doesn’t believe the Bucs offense would get worse with Blount playing more on third down. His mere presence should soften the defense. Every time Blount jogs off the field Joe swears he can hear the happy sighs of defensive players.

Blount’s legitimately a dangerous weapon that the Bucs didn’t use or develop nearly as much as they should have this season.

In his “10 Things You Need to Know” about the NFL after Week 16, Mike Florio, the creator, curator and overall guru of ProFootballTalk.com explains on NBC SportsTalk “The Status of Raheem Morris.” The subject is No. 9.

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"Hey Dominik, me and Sam Bradford and Caddy are gonna eat you for lunch next year"

As Joe briefly touched on in the Morning Cup of Joe today, and what is now buzzing around NFL circles, Chucky wants back in coaching for 2012 and St. Louis or San Diego could be high on his Christmas list.

Joe hopes Chucky gets either job. Why? Because the Bucs will play both the Rams and the Chargers next season.

Would a Chucky return muster a home sellout and/or stimulate a national TV appearance?

If nothing else, the Buc facing Chucky in 2012 would pump a little extra excitement into next year, especially if Raheem Morris is Chucky’s new defensive backs coach and Greg Olson is coaching his QB.

If there’s one reason — and there’s more — why the Bucs absolutely have to be active in free agency when the cash bell rings in March, it’s because of the shoddy play of the Bucs linebackers.

Collectively, the current crop of linebackers misses tackles, doesn’t shed blocks, lands in the wrong gaps, and isn’t physical. Amazingly, they combined for just 10 tackles in 49 offensive snaps for Carolina on Saturday. That’s a dubious feat, consdering Cam Newton only threw four incompletions and the Panthers ran the ball 30+ times.

Simply stated, Geno Hayes and Quincy Black have had dreadful seasons. Neither deserve to be more than the answers to Bucs trivia questions in 2012. Each has had three full seasons to prove himself since grabbing top-dog status on the linebacker depth chart from Angelo Crowell and Jermaine Phillips (yes, those names were painful for Joe to type) early in the 2009 campaign.

Obviously, the Bucs had high hopes for Black after paying him a king’s ransom this offseason. He turns 28 in February entering his sixth season. What question hasn’t been answered about him? Surely, he’s put enough on tape to get a pink slip. And Raheem Morris himself said he expected “absolute dominance” from Hayes. Neither delivered.

In Carolina, Mason Foster sure didn’t look like the guy Raheem was gushing over last week, but as a 22-year-old late third-round pick, Foster pretty much had the season expected of him, especially considering the corps around him.

If the Bucs decide to draft a linebacker with a premium pick in 2012, surely they’ll need and want a stud free agent LB to work alongside the rookie and Foster. If they don’t use a top pick on an LB, then they’ll surely need a veteran beast at linebacker to change the culture of the unit and the defense.

Dakoda Watson has shown a lot of good things, but the Bucs can’t keep plugging in seventh rounders as starters and hoping for elite play.

Joe expects to be very busy writing about the excitement of massive coaching changes in the coming weeks, but right now Joe finds it therapeutic to think about filling the Bucs’ many holes, the biggest of which are in the center of the defense.

If people think Joe takes some morbid pleasure over the way the Bucs have sunk from a promising season into a complete and total tailspin, well, that perception cannot be further from the truth.

When a Bucs embattled coach may just be days away from being jettisoned, it’s sad for Joe because that means the team is doing terribly.

Not only is Morris a virtual pinata for fans in recent weeks, he’s starting to catch heat from national media types, like Sports Illustrated’s Peter King via Twitter.

@FootballPost: Morris doesn’t believe he should be fired. Says everyone bought youth plan

@SI_PeterKing: It’d be wise to start coaching said youth.

The blast from King also seemed to perhaps offer a ray of sunshine for Morris, if you read between the characters, that if Morris coaches up his young squad for an upset over the Dixie Chicks Sunday, there is a glimmer of hope for Morris’ return.

Or, has the dye already been cast?

Appearing on the segment “Word on the Street” on the man’s channel, NFL Network, a piece was devoted to the job status of embattled Bucs coach Raheem Morris.

NFL Network host Paul Burmeister suggested to Rick Stroud of the St. Petersburg Times that Morris’ tenure as the Bucs coach is “a little bit in doubt” and Stroud corrected Burmeister suggesting Morris is “most likely” gone no matter if the Bucs beat the Dixie Chicks next week or not.

Stroud suggested that youth isn’t the lone factor in the losing, but lack of depth. The entire segment can be viewed here.

Bucs general manager Mark Dominik greets former Air Force Staff Sgt. Andreas Bernt, who received a gift from the Bucs to help refurbish his home so it can become wheelchair accessible. Photo courtesy of Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

Enough for the time being of the dire predictions for embattled Bucs coach Raheem Morris, the collapse of the defense or LeGarrette Blount being benched.

No, it’s still Christmastime. And that means helping the community and a couple of cool items Joe has been negligent about posting need to be acknowledged.

Last week. an Air Force veteran, who has been felled by a variety of illnesses from his service, needed his house refurbished because he is relegated to a wheelchair and the Bucs pitched in some $40,000 to help pay the costs, cites TBO.com.

The kitchen counters are too high. The doors in the house are too narrow. The bathroom isn’t accommodating for a person in a wheelchair.

Those problems and more, though, will soon be remedied, thanks to a $40,000 donation from the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the work of Rebuilding Together Tampa Bay.

The organizations are teaming together to remodel the Tampa home of retired U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Andreas Bernt. Bernt has been dealing with a variety of serious medical problems, including lymphoma and transverse myelitis, a neurological disorder that has left him using a wheelchair.

Also, Metropolitian Ministries, which does much for the less-priviledged in the area, was running short of supplies to give children and put out a request to the community to render additional aid if they could.

Attacking the task like a hobbled quarterback, many Bucs defensive linemen came to the rescue, baring loads of toys and bikes for youngsters, so wrote multimedia master Scott Smith of Buccaneers.com.

Help arrived on Thursday afternoon in the form of five large men carrying armfuls of toys, bicycles, board games and electronics to Metropolitan Ministries’ annual toy drive. With their combined weight tipping the scale at nearly one ton, Buccaneers’ defensive linemen Lamar Divens, Jovan Haye, Albert Haynesworth, Roy Miller and Frank Okam proved that they are big men with even bigger hearts as the crew perused the aisles of a local Wal-mart to collect toys for needy children.

“I just knew that when we all got together as a D-line that we could do something great,” Miller said. “I got the idea that we should put the money together, and it turned out to be a great thing. Who would have known that a couple hundred dollars could have done this and made some kids’ Christmas that special?”

Pooled together, the defensive linemen’s contributions was more like thousands of dollars in Christmas presents. The players filled several shopping carts to the brim with holiday toys and gifts and then delivered them to the nearby Ministries location. The players were overjoyed to participate in the holiday contribution spearheaded by Miller, even though they had just finished a 90-minute practice at One Buccaneer Place before their shopping spree.

Also last week, the team held its annual “Day of Giving,” where some 30 needy families were chosen by the United Way of families. The families then arrived at One Buc Palace for something other than a tour, so Smith writes.

The families were then split up into three groups and led out behind One Buccaneer Place. The assembly moved along the back of the facility towards the Buccaneers’ enormous weight room. Between the main building and the weight room is a breezeway, and as the children on hand surged around the corner into the breezeway they were greeted with another wonderful surprise. Lining both sides of the passageway was a bicycle for each child, helpfully tagged by name. Smaller children not ready for bicycles were given Big Wheel-type tricycles.

It took some time for the kids’ excitement over their new bikes to die down, but the group then learned that the Day of Giving still wasn’t over. At that point, three large buses pulled into view, ready to take the whole crowd to a nearby Target store, where the families were going to be sent on a shopping spree.

As upset as we are about how this football season has totally collapsed and as angry as some might be over the direction of the team, one thing is clear to Joe: The Bucs care about the needy and give back to the community.

Well done gentlemen. Well done.

For weeks, Joe’s heard some callers to sports radio say that Raheem Morris should not be fired because a coach can’t logically go from being a legitimate Coach of the Year candidate one season to a coach worthy of firing the next.

And that argument was given more life today when Raheem himself floated a similar take during his Monday news conference.

Well, Joe knows plenty of coaches that were hailed as superstars one season and forced to walk the plank after the following campaign.

Obviously, Todd Haley is a recent example with the Chiefs. Pete Carroll was canned after his third year in New England, despite never having a losing season there. And Bill Belichick was in a situation similar to Raheem’s with the Browns back in the mid-1990s.

There have been others.

Belicheat was a young man in his fourth season as head coach when the Browns broke through with an 11-5 record in 1994. They shocked the NFL by allowing a league-best 12.8 points per game. And the Browns marched into the Wild Card playoffs and took out New England, led by 1994 AP Coach of the Year Bill Parcells.

Belicheat was fired after a 5-11 record in 1995.

It happens. Especially to younger first-time head coaches that typically get a lot less leeway than their more experienced colleagues.

Now the past few weeks Joe has heard a lot about players “quitting,” which is a damning accusation for a professional football player.

Joe is not one to point fingers and say “Player-X tanked it” because without foolproof evidence like that of Dallass defensive back Michael Jenkins, it’s hard to know what is in said player’s mind or heart.

But Ashley Fox of BSPN seems to be jumping on the bandwagon, saying the Bucs quit; adamantly so.

The Buccaneers did quit. It likely will cost coach Raheem Morris his job. If the players really liked playing for the 35-year-old Morris, they would not have laid down the way they did against Carolina. They allowed the Panthers to drive down the field on their opening possession, and it just got worse from there.

The Bucs trailed 20-10 at halftime but allowed Carolina to score 28 unanswered points out of the break. They allowed the Panthers to score on fourth-and-1 from the 11-yard line, gave up a 41-yard touchdown run to quarterback Cam Newton, lost a fumble on the ensuing kickoff and gave up another touchdown two plays later.

A team that wants its coach to retain his job doesn’t lose a division game 48-16.

Joe believes Fox’s last sentence the be the most accurate. You always hear Bucs players suggest they like playing for Morris and enjoy him. But it doesn’t appear they are playing with the fire to save their coach’s job.

That’s a big difference from quitting.

Pressed by the media today about his job security and asked whether he would retain himself for 2012, Raheem Morris made it clear that the Bucs’ woes are a team effort and the focus — good and bad — shouldn’t be all on him.

He also offered a bit of a defense for his record during the Monday afternoon news conference.

“You don’t go from being a coach of the year candidate to being the worst coach in the league to get fired within a year,” Raheem said.

Channeling the team concept, Raheem also referenced the “the collective agreement to go young” between the three-headed leadership team of himself, Mark Dominik and Team Glazer.

Raheem seems very confident he should return. Joe admires his confidence, but Joe thinks Raheem a little too caught up with past accomplishments.

Good and great head coaches get fired all the time. And Raheem has proven he’s not in either category yet.

Before training camp, Davin Joseph said lockout time for yoga and other alternative training unavailable at One Buc Palace would help him stay healthier this season. Apparently, it has.

Sure, JoeBucsFan.com is your sometimes-friendly, all-things-Bucs site, but occasionally Joe strays a little off path. And since this involves theFalcons, it’s not too far off track.

The New York Times ran a feature story yesterday on the Falcons’ fitness philosophy over the past handful of seasons, one that comines ancient stuff with modern concepts, filexibility, and revolutionary analysis mixed in. Joe recommends you read the whole piece.

The team’s fitness room evokes a workout gym in a bygone era. Players hoist kettlebells— cast-iron balls with handles — that date to ancient Greece. Other gear of a certain age includes medicine balls and jump rope.

“We’re pretty basic,” Cook said. With such accessories, he added, “you can get closer to the movements in competition.”

Until this year, tight end Tony Gonzalez skillfully charted his own fitness course, losing only two games to injuries in nearly 15 seasons.

In deference to his age, Gonzalez, 35, incorporated F.M.S. practices, with no regrets.

“I told Fish, ‘I wish I would have listened to you a little sooner,’ ” Gonzalez said.

The Falcons claim their way has led to fewer injuries, per the article, and about eight NFL teams have adopted some of their fundamentals.

That got Joe thinking about how Davin Joseph said the lockout helped him because he had more time to do yoga and other personal training not available at One Buc Palace, stuff he felt was better for his healing knee and foot.

Just something different to think about before this losing streak sends you to the Skyway.

The ESPN pitchforks are sharpened and its jabs are coming hard at Raheem Morris.

Pat Yasinskas, the Disney outfit’s NFC South blogger/beat writer, says keeping Raheem under any circumstances is “ludicrous,” so he penned after the Bucs’ beating at Carolina.

I know there’s a small minority out there who say Morris should keep his job, replace himself as defensive coordinator and make a switch at offensive coordinator. Yeah, that’s brilliant and no doubt would put the Bucs straight into the Super Bowl next season. Actually, it’s ludicrous. It’s like having a refrigerator that hasn’t worked in more than two months and saying, “No need to call a repairman or get a new one because this thing just might kick in at any moment.”

Joe often disagrees with Yasinskas, but not here, though Joe finds the refrigerator analogy a bit off the mark. For Joe, four straight blowouts, three straight home blowouts, nine straight losses, and widespread acceptance that the Bucs aren’t giving their all, is enough to end any coach’s reign.