Lakeland Ledger’s Patrick Zier said this quote the day after the 1995 NFL Draft; “Since (LeeRoy) Selmon retired in 1984 and (Hugh) Green left in 1985, the Bucs have not had an impact player. Suddenly they may have picked up two.” He was referring of course to Warren Sapp and Derrick Brooks. Funny, but this just reminds of me this years draft, and how the Bucs got a pair of starters in McCoy and Price who should be able to do what Sapp and Brooks did; reignite a defensive stalwart that shows up high in the rankings on NFL.com. Problem is that so few people were around for the birth of the Tony Dungy era Bucs that no one can remember how it was done. No one can remember the draft picks the Bucs used to build the foundation, especially when we live in an era of big spending on free agents, whose rankings on ESPN.com are more important than their actual bodies of work. People only see the SuperBowl winning teams and the couple of free agents they acquired before that season on. What they don’t see is the way that team was built, the way the foundation was put into place first. In 2010, The NFL Odds say the Bucs will look a lot like the 1995 or 1996 version of the team; full of young, quality talent that is learning on the job, and learning from it is losses. There won’t be a 3 win season like last year, we already went through that. But if you watch and learn, you’ll be around in 10-15 years when the next group of pessimists tries to tell us that Joel Glazer doesn’t know what he’s doing then either.
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