Curses! Foiled Again!

The Tangerine Dream

Injuries on the offensive line may have stymied the Seattle Seahawks offense, yet they continue to win. Monday’s 14:9 win St. Louis over the Rams may have been one of the ugliest wins in history, but wins are a precious commodity worth cherishing in the NFL, and the Seahawks now stand 7-1 and atop the NFC standings. And now comes the most important game of the season. A win this coming Sunday is vital for the Seahawks and their Super Bowl aspirations. It’s the game they circled on the schedule and say amongst themselves “we simply cannot lose this game!”

Their opponent? The Tampa Bay Buccaneers. The 0-7 Buccaneers. Laugh at my hyperbolical opening paragraph at your own peril.

Unlike the Buccaneers of old, who wore the league’s most flamboyant jerseys and put the fun in dysfunctional, this lot of Bucs is deader than the skull on their pewter helmets. The Buccaneers actually won a Super Bowl on Jan. 27, 2003, a 48:21 over the Los Angeles Tijuana Oakland Raiders (some of whom apparently thought the game was in Tijuana and not San Diego), but have now sunk into the abyss. The biggest reason for their success was the hiring first of Tony Dungy and then Jon Gruden as Head Coaches, but the Bucs have now reverted to one of their more normal behaviour patterns from the Tangerine Dream days, which was hiring guys who have no idea what they are doing. They plucked Greg Schiano out of the cesspool that is the Rutgers athletics department, and Schiano brought along with him the typical hardass, domineering college coach attitude that goes over well with professional athletes for about 20 minutes. Schiano has hit every wrong note possible, and then simply invented new scales so as to hit even more wrong notes. If ownership in Tampa weren’t essentially absentee – The Glazer family has some bigger sports franchises to devote their attentions to – Schiano likely would’ve been fired already. As it is, the Bucs are collectively walking the plank.

Now, how is it possible, you ask, that the halpless Bucs could pose a threat to Seattle’s title hopes? The Bucs are so bad that, in saying Seattle cannot lose this game, it may actually be physically impossible for Seattle to do so. And yet the Seahawks must be careful, and must be mindful of those Floridian evildoers, because they aren’t just playing a bad football team this Sunday, but the Seahawks are tempting fate. Because every game vs. the Bucs is tempting fate, because being defeated by the Bucs will lead to the worst possible outcome.

Being laughed at.

No no no! Being laughed at is only the 2nd worst fate a loss to the Pewter Pirates inflicts! An even worse fate awaits those who succumb to the Buccaneers on any given Sunday: disappointment at season’s end! And it’s appropriate, on the eve of the day on the calendar reserved for witches and ghosts and ghouls, that we bring up one of the greatest curses in all of sports, which is the Tampa Bay Curse. Since the Buccaneers franchise began play in 1976, no team has EVER won the Super Bowl during a season in which they lost to Tampa Bay.

Superstition runs deep and rampant in sports, of course. The mental aspect of performance cannot be understated, and the margins between success and failure are so minute that any single thing which you think gives you some sort of edge will be exploited – even if they don’t make any sense. If you’re a .500 team that suddenly wins 5 in a row after your starting QB starts eating Cheerios with chocolate milk for breakfast, then by god, give him another bowl of Cheerios with chocolate milk! As was well stated in the film Bull Durham, “never fuck with a winning streak.”

The stupidest superstition in all of sports is the charade 16 NHL teams undertake every year when the players vow not to shave until they are eliminated from the Stanley Cup playoffs. 16 teams do this every year, and 15 of them lose, so it doesn’t seem to help much. This superstition dates to the New York Islanders of 1980, who won the first of four consecutive Stanley Cup titles while collectively going scruffy. The LOSE suspects the Isles winning four Stanley Cups had more to do with having Mike Bossy and Brian Trottier and Denis Potvin and Billy Smith on their team than how hirsute they’d become over the course of four rounds of playoff games. (The LOSE also hopes this ludicrous tradition doesn’t carry over to baseball in light of the Red Sox winning this year's World Series. Those are some damn ugly beards the Bostons have been sprouting. The Red Sox seem to have benefitted this year in the same way the Giants did last year, which was to face an opponent in the World Series who seems to have suddenly forgotten how to play baseball.)

There are lots of goofy little traditions in sports which you do so as not to bring bad luck or jinx it: in baseball, that includes axioms like “don’t talk to a pitcher throwing a no-hitter when he’s in the dugout,” and “never step on the foul lines when taking or leaving the field.” Every goalkeeper and goaltender alive makes sure to talk to his or her goalposts before the game, making sure the keeper's best friends know their help is appreciated come game time. And it’s all nonsense. What your QB eats for breakfast doesn’t have anything to do with his performance come Sunday … or does it? …

Hmm, well, the Seahawks franchise already feels somewhat cursed to begin with, so it’s best they not try to cheat the odds. Lots of team’s fan bases feel like their club is cursed, of course, when they fail to taste success. Cubs fans want to believe in the Billy Goat curse; across town, more than a few White Sox fans attributed 86 years of futility being the result of Bad Karma in the aftermath of the Black Sox scandal of 1919. The Red Sox had the Curse of the Bambino, supposedly invoked by Babe Ruth after he was traded to the Yankees. The cities of Cleveland and Buffalo have enough assorted sports curses attached to them to keep exorcists busy for decades. And I’ve even heard a few otherwise right-minded Tampans attribute their football teams woes to former star QB Doug Williams putting a voodoo curse on the franchise after he left.

The Bucs have always been a franchise with a case of the weirds. They lost the first 26 games in their existence. It took until the NFC Championship Game in Philadelphia in Jan. 2003 for the warm-weather Bucs to ever win a game when the temperature was below 32° F. It took 31 years for the Bucs to run a kickoff back for a TD. (For comparison’s sake, the New Orleans Saints – who have often been just as bad as the Bucs – ran the opening kickoff of their first game back for a TD. But after John Gilliam’s 94-yd return in 1967 vs. the Rams, the Saints proceeded to lose the game 27:13 and then continued to lose for about the next 25 years straight.)

Even when they succeed, the Bucs do it strangely:

“With four games left in the (1979) season, the Bucs needed to win only one of them to make the playoffs. In the first, STP was put all over the goal posts in Tampa to prevent the goalposts from being ripped down in the event of a celebration. Four blocked kicks later, the Bucs wasted the oily substance, falling to the Minnesota Vikings 23–22. STP was wasted again the following week as the Bucs were shut out 14–0 by the Chicago Bears, and in O. J. Simpson's final home game in San Francisco, Tampa Bay lost its third straight attempt to clinch a division title against a 49ers team which came in with a 1–13 record.”
– Wikipedia

In order to clinch a playoff spot that season, the Bucs beat the Chiefs 3:0 in the worst weather for a football game I have ever seen. The Bucs have always kept it zany, win or lose – and usually lose.

And then there is the Tampa Bay Curse, which is admittedly pretty bizarre. There is some logical explanation for the curse, of course. Given that the Buccaneers have generally been inept, so if the Bucs beat your team, it’s a good bet your team sucks. But as the Bucs’ fortunes improved, good and sometimes even great teams with visions of Super Bowl glory have seen the Curse rise up and destroy their fortunes. The 1998 Minnesota Vikings went 15-1. Guess who they lost to? And then what happened? Their kicker, Gary Anderson, who hadn’t missed a kick all season, flubbed his lines with the NFC Championship game hanging in the balance. He missed a 38 yd. FG that would’ve put the game out of reach, and the Atlanta Falcons rallied to win 30:27 in OT and go to the Super Bowl.

More recently, I recall this conversation which may or may not have happened back in Jan. 2002 between myself and Tim Williams – loyal Rams fan, Friend of the LOSE, and co-founder and senior partner of the law firm of Williams Morgan & Williams – on the eve of Super Bowl XXXVI in New Orleans:

Tim: I can’t believe our dumbass boss is going to the Super Bowl.
xp: Yeah, Barnes sucks. Screw him.
Tim: Rams are gonna win by 21 pts. Greatest Show on Turf, baby.
xp: Didn’t the Rams lose to Tampa Bay this season?
Tim: Uhh …
xp: You guys are screwed.
Tim: We’re so screwed.

The Patriots, of course, pulled the 20:17 upset in the Super bowl.

So listen up, Seahawks: you must not lose to Tampa Bay. YOU MUST NOT LOSE TO TAMPA BAY!! It is a DISASTER of EPIC PROPORTIONS if you lose to Tampa at-Bay …

Wait, hold on a second here. I'm being told by a member of my crack research team (emphasis on crack) here at IN PLAY LOSE World HQ that, in fact, the curse was broken four years ago. Hmm, let me check this for myself … Dec., 27, 2009, Tampa Bay 20:17 New Orleans in O.T. … Super Bowl XLIV, Feb. 7, 2010, New Orleans 31:17 Indianapolis … hmm …

Damn, this blog entry was going really well, too. Well screw it then. Tampa sucks. Just beat the hell out of them. Everyone else is doing it these days.