When Joe wants to learn about defensive line play, who better to turn to than former Bucs defensive end Steve White? The guy has played the game at its highest levels and breaks down football so even the chicks at Panera with their foo-foo coffees and lattes (with Sweet ‘N Low!) prattling about Pottery Barn tripe can understand.

So on his blog, “Passing on the Game,” White details what a mess this is to employ a three-man defensive front rush on a drop back quarterback like Matty Ice.

While White is proud of how far the Bucs have come this season, he’s about ready to toss his remote control through his plasma TV if he sees Raheem Morris use another three-man defensive front again in passing situations.

Now I know I have beaten this dead horse all year but it literally made my head hurt to see the Bucs use the 3-3-5 so much yesterday. We may not have any pro bowlers up front but we do have some guys who can pass rush if given a chance. Instead they were put in situations where they three guys had to try to beat five along with a chip block or we blitzed which never seems to get much pressure either. Don’t get me wrong, a few times guys still were able to beat two offensive lineman and get some pressure, but why make it so damn hard? I just will never understand why Coach Morris is so wedded to a defense that doesn’t produce favorable results the majority of the time. Especially when in my eyes its clear that a four man rush has been much more productive this year.

I’ll tell you this much, no matter what anybody says I am convinced that we would have been better off rushing four to at least have a shot of getting some pressure on Matt Ryan on 3rd and 20 instead just rushing three. And while that one play didn’t lose the game for us, that conversion was definitely a back breaker.

Joe touched upon this Sunday. Ryan needed to get 20 yards for a first down. He’s not that mobile. The absolute worst thing the Bucs could have done was allow Ryan plenty of time to find an open receiver, and Matty Ice threw a perfect pass for a 25-yard gain and a first down.

To Joe, this was a blatant example of playing not to lose instead of playing to win.

The Bucs lost.

The Bucs are loaded with rookies. These same rookies are used to playing maybe a dozen games. Counting preseason, the Bucs have played 16.

This is a term heard often in the NFL and to some degree, in the NBA. So it’s a relevant question that Tampa Tribune columnist Martin Fennelly asks. Have the Bucs hit a wall?

We always knew the wall might be out there for Raheem Morris’ precocious club, and this feels like it.

For the first time this season, this team has lost twice in a row, and it’s the very worst time of the season to do that.

You look at the NFL’s youngest team and wonder, hey, isn’t 12 games about the length of your college football regular season?

While Fennelly’s question is valid, Joe doesn’t know if it’s accurate. Arrelious Benn, a rookie, continues to improve. Mike Williams doesn’t seem to have dropped off. Gerald McCoy, well, he was improving.  Cody Grimm seemed to be on the upswing when he was hurt.

So Joe doesn’t think the wall is a factor… yet.

The Bucs awful Monday got worse today as Rick Stroud of the St. Petersburg Times is reporting via Twitter that Bucs cornerback Aqib Talib is out for the year and placed on injured reserve.

@NFLSTROUD: CB Aqib Talib will miss the rest of the season for the Bucs with a hip injury. No surgery, but he tore a tendon from the bone.

This is ugly news for the Bucs secondary already down Tanard Jackson who has all but smoked himself out of the NFL, and Cody Grimm who broke his fibula last week.

The news is also troubling for Jeff Faine as Stroud, again on Twitter, suggests Faine’s return in 2010 is not at all certain.

@NFLSTROUD: Bucs also likely have lost C Jeff Faine for the season with a triceps injury.

With all do respect to Faine, this isn’t as bad as Talib; though clearly not good. Zuttah will do fine in Faine’s place. Talib’s loss is a much bigger hole to fill.

There goes Talib’s Pro Bowl shot, and he finishes the year with six interceptions and one off-field berating of an official in 10 1/2 games.

Faine, in Joe’s mind, now has one foot out the door. He’s 29. He makes big money. And he’ll have missed a pile of games in 2009 and 2010. Throw in Jeremy Zuttah filling in well at center, and Faine looks like old, damaged and replaceable goods.

Joe’s not sure the Bucs can recover successfully this season from yet another round of lost players, especially two guys contributing at a high level. This seemingly makes rookie Derek Hardman the starter at right guard for the rest of the season with Zuttah moving to center, and Talib’s talent and playmaking is irreplaceable.

Regardless, Joe expects the Bucs to win their next three games: at Washington and home against Detroit and Seattle.

But beating New Orleans at their place now requires a much a greater miracle.

Any fan can pick apart yesterday’s painful Bucs-Falcons game, but one point keeps sticking in Joe’s gut like a three day old ham sandwich.

With all the trickery and creativity the Bucs have employed this year on offense, Joe has yet to see them attempt a hard count to draw a team offsides.

The Bucs had 4th-and-1 on the Atlanta 41 yard line with 3:30 left in the third quarter on the heels of LeGarrette Blount getting stuffed on 3rd-and-1. And the Bucs sent out the punt team.

Although Joe is still stunned that Raheem Morris got ultra conservative in that spot, where at least was the hard count to draw off Atlanta?

Maybe throw Josh Johnson in at quarterback with Blount in the backfield and a weird looking formation to push Atlanta into a timeout?

Something?

At that point, the Bucs could have taken a delay of game penalty. The situation was ripe to try to draw Atlanta off.

Not even trying shortchanged the team. Hey, it was good enough for New Orleans yesterday.

After this hard-fought TD against Pittsburgh, LeGarrette Blount was Raheem Morris' short-yardage guy. ...Not anymore.

He’s big and nasty, but LeGarrette Blount has struggled in short yardage.

That was painfully evidenced yesterday, as it was in the first game against the Falcons at Atlanta last month.

Blount just doesn’t seem to hammer the line, or dive over it, like a true short-yardage back. Bucs color analyst Dave Moore was talking about it during the game, saying Blount has a stutter step and run downhill into the line.

In his noon news conference today at One Buc Palace, Raheem Morris didn’t hesitate to say that Blount may be out of his element on short yardage.

Morris explained that nobody would know if Blount could be successful in that situation until he was given shots in games.  And Morris said short yardage execution is an area where Blount may need more coaching, despite his punishing, 250-pound frame.

“Unfortunaetly, that may not be him,” Raheem said of Blount being the short-yardage guy. “The thing he does, he’s a patient runner. …It frustrates you. …We may have to look in another direction.”

The Bucs opened the season with Earnest Graham as “the guy” in short yardage. But he had a goal line fumble on opening day and obviously fell out of favor. Two games later, Blount got his shot — with success — against Pittsburgh, but has seen little success since.

Joe can’t see why Blount couldn’t be coached up in this area. But it might take beyond this season to turn him around.

Joe’s done the heavy lifting for you on the Bucs’ playoff chances.

First, let Joe say the Bucs have to win their next three games against lesser teams. That would bring the Bucs to 10-5 and an 8-3 conference record, which is the second Wild Card playoff tiebreaker after head-to-head record.

Current records:

NY Giants (8-4, 6-2 in NFC)

at Minnesota
PHILADELPHIA
at Green Bay
at Washington

Philadelphia Eagles (8-4, 5-3 in NFC)

at Dallas
at New York
MINNESOTA
DALLAS

Chicago Bears (9-3, 7-3 in NFC)

NEW ENGLAND
at Minnesota
NEW YORK JETS
at Green Bay

Green Bay Packers (8-4, 6-3 in NFC)

at Detroit
at New England
NEW YORK GIANTS
Chicago

New Orleans (9-3, 7-2 in NFC)

ST. LOUIS
at Baltimore
at Atlanta
TAMPA BAY

Tampa Bay (7-5, 5-3 in NFC)

at Washington
DETROIT
SEATTLE
at New Orleans

If the Bucs win their next three to get to 10-5 (8-3 in NFC), they’ll likely then be tied with the Giants and Eagles and a conference win ahead of the Eagles. This assumes the Giants beat the Eagles at home on Dec. 19 and the Packers beat the Giants in Green Bay the following week.

Regarding Green Bay, with the above scenario, the Bucs would then be tied with Green Bay at 10-5 (same conference record), assuming the Packers lose in New England on Dec. 19 and beat Detroit on Sunday.

Now New Orleans is two games up on the Bucs now, but its next three games are home against the Rams, then at Baltimore and at Atlanta, two games where they’ll be underdogs.

Bottom Line: If the Bucs win their next three, and the above likely scenarios play out, then Tampa Bay will have to win in New Orleans to close the season to get in the playoffs. Barring a miracle collapse of other teams in the hunt, the Bucs have to win out.

Former Bucs guard Ian Beckles (1990-1996), co-host of The Ron and Ian Show on WDAE-AM 620, likes what he sees from the Buccaneers, but he cautions fans that the team may not progress beyond this point.

“We have the ability to make great teams average,” Beckles said of Sunday’s performance of the 10-2 Falcons. “Same thing against the Ravens. The Bucs are good enough to beat anyone but they’re not closing.”

“But they might not get better next year. None of this means they’ll be better next year. Some teams don’t figure it out.”

Joe thinks this is a wise point. 

Until the Bucs next beat a top NFL team, uncertainity will be around One Buc Palace and across the fan base and beyond. Heck, last year the Bucs beat two elite teams — Green Bay and New Orleans.

It’s going to be a torturous offseason if the Bucs can’t win in New Orleans in January or win a playoff game.

Jim Basquil and Eric Allen break down the Dixie Chicks-Bucs game in this BSPN video.

It was there. The Bucs had it.

It was the first win over a winning team this season. It was staying alive for a division title. It was perhaps a virtual playoff berth.

Then… poof! It all blew up in the time it took for Joe to go buy a beer.

Veteran sports columnist Gary Shelton of the St. Petersburg Times documents how the Bucs lost a whole lot more than a game in a span of a handful of minutes Sunday.

Then they collapsed.

And in the rubble, everything the Bucs seemed ready to claim was squandered.

The Bucs blew their lead, and their opportunity, and their validation, in a 28-24 game that must have felt like a stake to the heart. From here, the season looks uphill again. From here, the playoffs seem far away. From here, the Bucs still look like a team that has improved, but not nearly enough.

This one still stings Joe. Even through the fog of a Monday morning and the requisite 22-ounce Dunkin Donuts coffee and 16-ounce bottle of Diet Mountain Dew, Joe needs more chemicals to ingest to salve the inflammation of this ugly, ugly fourth quarter collapse.

Something tells Joe he will still be hurting over this throughout the offseason.

The Bucs had the game. The crowd was giddy. Players dreams danced below the John McKay floppy hats. All was good amid the creamsicle yesterday at the CITS.

But then it quickly unraveled. The Bucs forgot to tackle on a kickoff. Forgot to pressure one of the best quarterbacks in the NFL allowing the Dixie Chicks not only to wiggle off the hook, but to rally and win the damned game.

In just a few minutes, the Bucs went from playoffs to desperation, from postseason to worrying about the draft.

Tampa Tribune Martin Fennelly believes that in a handful of minutes, Raheem Morris went from his greatest victory as Bucs coach to perhaps his worst loss.

When this Bucs season is over, there will be talk of improvement, of talent on the rise — but not this morning.

This morning is for how do you allow that return guy, trapped on the sideline, escape for the one thing that you couldn’t let happen, a 102-yard touchdown, a 21-second gut punch that instantly sucked out every bit of your momentum and turned this game upside down?

This morning is for how do you give up a first down on third-and-20? Or throw in a pass interference penalty and personal foul to help Atlanta, which seems to specialize in ripping the Bucs’ hearts out, on its way to 10-2 while sending you reeling to 7-5?

Now the Bucs, still with a real possibility of finishing that race to 10, could be on the outside watching the postseason party through a picture window shivering outside.

This is what happens when a team isn’t aggressive throughout a game.

It was the play that not only changed the game, but likely lost the game for the Bucs.

It was gut-wrenching for Joe watch Eric Weems run 102 yards for a kickoff return that pulled the Dixie Chicks within a field goal of the Bucs just after the Bucs had taken a 10-point lead.

Good guy Mo Stovall could have had Weems out of bounds. He didn’t. But Stovall manned up after the game and told Stephen Holder of the St. Petersburg Times the touchdown was on him.

“I had the missed tackle on the sideline,” he volunteered afterward. “It’s something that we practice every day. It was a great call by our special teams coach and his staff. It was just mis-executed by me. We were definitely in position to make that play. It was a good call and great kick by our kicker. It was just a missed tackle and you can’t have those in a big game like this.”

Watching that was like someone had kicked Joe in the cajones. What should have been a Dixie Chicks team with the life sucked out of them suddenly was energized.

In short, when the Bucs play teams with winning records, those teams find a way to win. The young Bucs haven’t learned how to do that yet.

Given the fact the Bucs still can’t beat a team with a winning record and their playoff chances took a hit today, veteran columnist Gary Shelton seems to think maybe it might be time for the Bucs to start looking to next year in this St. Petersburg Times video.

If the music operator at the Bucs game today had the nerve to break out the sacred A-Train whistle after one of LeGarrette Blount’s drag’em-seven-yard runs, the rowdy Bucs crowd would have gone absolutely wild.

The crowd was officially 53,955, per ESPN.com, and on TV it looked like nearly all those seats had a body in them without a heck of a lot of Falcons fans in the house.

Last year, “sellouts” of 61,000 or so were common in the 65,000+ seat Bucs’ home stadium. Club seats, of which there are 12,000, don’t count toward a sold out game for purposes of the television blackout, according to NFL rules. So that means to get today’s showcase game on TV, Team Glazer might only have had to gobble up 8,000 or so tickets.

For Joe, that’s a missed opportunity to grow the Bucs fanbase for years to come. And that saddens Joe.

How many new LeGarrette Blount fans are there right now if the game was televised in the Tampa Bay area? How many re-energized Bucs fans? How many new Bucs fans?

Perhaps the blackout is putting thousands more people in the seats, essentially working as its intended, to drive fans to the stadium. But even so, if Team Glazer had to buy, say, 10,000 Bucs-Falcons tickets at 34 cents on the dollar, as they reportedly did last year to “sell out” every game, that’s a $340,000 price tag to have put today’s exciting game on local TV.

Considering the size of the TV audience, that marketing expenditure would have been well worth it.

Tampa Bay remains a transient community. People are constantly moving in and their fanship has to be cultivated. It’s a lot harder to do that without a game on television.

It’s easy for Joe to tell Team Glazer to cut a check. Hey, it’s Monopoly money to Joe.

But given how profitable the Bucs are, Joe’s just not seeing how Team Glazer didn’t see the value in ensuring the Bucs-Falcons game was on local TV, especially after the game was bumped to 4:15 p.m., when most other stuff going on around town is over and people are parked in front of their TVs.

Amid the pain and suffering of this heinous choke job against the Falcons today, Joe would be remiss to not mention Sammie Stroughter’s play.

After missing a couple of games with an injury and seemingly coming back slowly, Strougther came up big today. The stat geeks say he was targeted six times, and he caught six balls, including a stunning catch on fourth down in heavy traffic on the Bucs’ final drive.

The body control and concentration on that play was not lost on Joe.

Stroughter’s got 23 catches on the year, second among Bucs’ wideouts. And it seems he’ll eclipse the 31 balls he grabbed last year. Not bad for a seventh-rounder.

Maybe Joe’s out of his mind.

LeGarrette Blount pounded out 103 yards on 20 carries today and Joe still doesn’t think he got the ball enough. It feels like the Bucs get away from the running game early, even when it’s working.

Greg Olson is just not content with giving Blount the ball until the opponent proves it can stop him.

Before the Bucs’ final drive, they had called more passes than runs.

Blount is the biggest weapon on offense. He’s the straw that stirs the drink. He was not on the field in the Bucs’ 4-minute offense to close the game.

Plenty of time to run the ball, yet no Blount to even keep the defense honest. Heck, the Bucs never even busted out a draw play to Cadillac Williams that was so effective in past games.

Raheem Morris has said since training camp if the Bucs finish the race to 10 they will be in the playoffs.

Unlikely this year.

The Bucs playoff hopes took a massive hit today when Matty Ice and the Dixie Chicks rallied from 10 points down in the fourth quarter to beat the Bucs. So let’s look at the NFC standings.

If the season ended today, the Dixie Chicks would win the division and have the best record in the division. Both Philadelphia and the New York Giants are a game ahead of the Bucs at 8-4. The Dixie Chicks are three games ahead of the Bucs and the Saints are two games ahead of the Bucs at 9-3. Both the Bears (9-4) and the Packers (8-4) lead the Bucs.

What will kill the Bucs is tiebreakers. The Bucs — all together now — have yet to beat a team with a winning record so unless the Bucs tie with the Saints and beat the Saints in New Orleans, it’s difficult to imagine the Bucs would have any tiebreaker advantage.

The Bucs will have to beat the Saints for just about any prayer of a playoff berth short of Chicago, Green Bay, Philadelphia and/or New York collapsing down the stretch.

One of the cool things about the Bucs the past couple of weeks has been the rebirth of the Bucs defensive line. But it was basically throwing in a towel on one play that may have doomed the Bucs today.

The Dixie Chicks had a 3rd-and-20 deep in their own territory. One stop and Atlanta was likely going to punt. With one of the best quarterbacks in the NFL barking signals, one would think putting pressure on him — as the Bucs had done most of the game — would have been advantageous.

But no. Defenisve coordinator Raheem Morris only used a three-man front on that fateful third down, on which Matty Ice completed a ridiculous pass to Roddy White for a first down.

Sure, White made an astounding catch but the pass from Matty Ice was perfect.  Part of the reason for the perfection was he had time to throw.

There’s a segment on the wonderful NFL Network series “Top Ten” where Warren Sapp howls in outrage over prevent defenses. Joe’s not sure Morris was calling a prevent defense but using a three-man front on a third-and-long on what could have been a victory-clinching play sure as hell smells like one to Joe.

Sure, Joe could sit here and finger all sorts of plays that cost the Bucs. But for some reason Morris, an aggressive coach, turned into a scared kitten today. So it seemed with Joe’s eyes.

Joe just ran across this photo from the Associated Press shot today in the Bucs loss to the Dixie Chicks. The photo shows Michael Turner scoring on a five-yard touchdown run in the first quarter. But as Joe learned long ago, the background makes the photo.

Joe would just love for any NFL official to e-mail him at joe@joebucsfan.com and explain to Joe how this is not a holding call?

Granted, this doesn’t mean the Dixie Chicks would not have scored on the drive even if a penalty was called but good grief, that’s not just a hold that’s a friggin’ choke hold that’s even illegal in the WWE!

Come on!

The thing many Bucs fans so positively unnerving about Father Dungy was he was so conservative even the John Birch Society disowned him.

Father Dungy made an art of playing not to lose — and no, it’s not the way the Pittsburgh Steelers played when Father Dungy was a defensive back for the Steel Curtain, much as Father Dungy would have people believe. Father Dungy was one of the few coaches Joe ever saw who would have a quarterback take a three yard loss to set up a 47-yard field goal, only to have the kick missed.

Sadly, Raheem Morris must have spoken to Father Dungy recently. Morris lost his aggressiveness, as did the Bucs and in turn, the game against the Dixie Chicks was lost as well.

Twice the Bucs had a fourth-and-one either at midfield or in Dixie Chicks territory. Twice the Bucs decided to kick: one was a field goal and another a punt.

When you have the best team in the NFC and Matty Ice on the ropes, you do not play not to lose which often means you lose. In the immortal words of Herm Edwards, “You play to win the game.”

The Bucs could have buried the Dixie Chicks. Instead, they let them wiggle off the hook. That’s what happens when you don’t play aggressive football.

Raheem Morris is an aggressive guy. Today, he got out of his shell. And it cost him and his team perhaps a playoff berth.