I want Bucs to fail.....

[Mission9]

i hope holtz was in the NYG locker room

I hope he was redesigning our playbook at his office on campus.

But while watching that game and seeing Schiano's defense torched for 600+ yards, it baffles me how USF doesn't see the opportunities when you blitz a team. I know Holtz isn't Tom Coughlin but there are ways to do it. After 2 years you would have thought he'd figure it out. Next year before we play RU up in New Brunswick, maybe Holtz can give Coughlin a quick call.

They did have one short pass completed over the middle to Davis. There needs to be more. A slant pass accross the middle can be a killer to the blitz.

[Southshore26]

Even the bucs players thought it was bush league.

[Triple B]

Meh ... This is like someone getting upset with a player trying to bunt late in a 1 run game where the opposing pitcher has a no hitter going. Play to the final whistle.

Haters gonna hate ...

[Mission9]

Even the bucs players thought it was bush league.

I think that the author meant that the Peyton Mannings' teammates thought it was bush league.

Thing of it is, if it worked, it would be one of the plays of the year.

Peyton?

[Mission9]

Even the bucs players thought it was bush league.

I think that the author meant that the Peyton Mannings' teammates thought it was bush league.

Thing of it is, if it worked, it would be one of the plays of the year.

Peyton?

Eli. Better?

I knew who you meant, just giving you a hard time! (Smiley face pouring beer)

[Southshore26]

Even the bucs players thought it was bush league.

I think that the author meant that the Peyton Mannings' teammates thought it was bush league.

Thing of it is, if it worked, it would be one of the plays of the year.

Yes... but if you saw the interviews with Ronde and Gerald McCoy, it was obvious that they thought it was a dumb move also... I'm going to guess that the rest of the players felt that way too.

[GaUSFBull]

The NFL didn't see anything wrong with it.

[Cow Pie]

Pretty obvious that the Bucs were going for a forced fumble, the very last thing that the Giants expected. Not like they were kicking Manning on the ground.

Didn't Manning get hurt on that play?

I think its cheap **** from the Guido from Jersey... the Buc's players did not like doing it either... all of the Buc's in the post game gave the "We were just following orders" statement.

[charsibb]

I LOVE this old comment:

"Rugby is a hooligans game played by gentlemen, and soccer is a gentleman's game played by hooligans"

Give me "rugby" 7 days of the week!

Sciano dishonors gentlemen everywhere. He's hooligan scum - always was, always will be.

[charsibb]

Pretty good analysis here

CON:

There's no fighting in a victory formation; or, why Greg Schiano is the worst kind of NFL coach.

From: Josh Levin|Posted Monday, Sept. 17, 2012, at 1:15 PM ET

To: Barry Petchesky

For the second year in a row, Slate and Deadspin are teaming up for a season-long NFL roundtable. Check back here each week as a rotating cast of football watchers discusses the weekend's key plays, coaching decisions, and traumatic brain injuries. And click here to play the latest episode of Slate’s sports podcast Hang Up and Listen.

Ask an NFL player about rule changes designed to make the sport safer—penalties for decapitating defenseless receivers and the like—and he'll tell you that the suits in the league office are ruining football. "I think the safest thing to do is leave the game alone," Ray Lewis said recently. "The game will take care of itself. It always has. … When you adjust so many [rules], sometimes it makes it worse."

What Lewis wants is for the NFL to become a self-policed state, with on-field retribution standing in for penalties, fines, and suspensions. Some of this is tough-guy posturing—this isn't flag football, they're turning us into sissies, etc. But it's also a statement of personal responsibility: a belief that the men on the field are accountable to each other, above all, for their own health and safety.

This was essentially the argument the Giants made after the Bucs crashed their "victory formation" on Sunday. From the Giants' perspective, Eli Manning's kneeldown with five seconds to go signified that the contested portion of the game was over. For Bucs coach Greg Schiano, the game wasn't over until the clock ran out, so he ordered the Tampa Bay defense to cannonball through the line. "I don't think you do that at this level," Giants coach Tom Coughlin said. Manning, for his part, called it "a little bit of a cheap shot." He said: "Going down, we are taking a knee, in a friendly way. They are firing off, and it's a way to get someone hurt."

What Manning is saying here is at once ridiculous—the gridiron equivalent of "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the war room!"—and totally reasonable. Schiano, who's in his first season in Tampa after a long tenure at Rutgers, is a classic example of a coach who preaches that the corrective to losing is a "new attitude." Submarining an opponent's kneeldown is a classic "new attitude" move—an attention-getting display of faux hustle that looks tough but accomplishes nothing.

"I don't know if that's not something that's not done in the National Football League, but what I do with our football team is we fight until they tell us game over," Schiano said after the game, pulling off a rare triple negative. And what did the Bucs accomplish by fighting until the game was literally over instead of fundamentally over? Instead of just losing, they managed to lose and make their opponents really angry. New attitude, indeed.

The unwritten rule that the Bucs violated is one that makes a lot of sense: Don't risk injuring yourself or others for no good reason. This is why the starters don't play in preseason, why nobody tries too hard on PAT attempts, why the Pro Bowl is a joke. Football is dangerous enough that there's no sense in hustling yourself into additional knee-wrenching and brain-rattling situations. The players need a code to keep themselves alive.

This is the intersection between pro football and pro wrestling. If two guys from the WWE understand the rules of engagement, they can pummel each other without anyone getting seriously hurt. If one of them doesn't know the routine, someone's getting an elbow to the face. The Bucs, with their college coach who's all about giving it the old college try, went off the script. And now, somebody's going to get hurt.

On Football Night in America, Peter King related something a Giants player had told him: "If the Bucs keep doing this, they're risking getting some cheap shots on their own players and maybe risking further injury." What Schiano will soon learn is that the NFL is a league of grudges and grievances, and the guy who makes the rules on the field is Hammurabi, not Roger Goodell. So, if we're talking eye-for-an-eye justice, a word of caution for Josh Freeman: Kneel at your peril. The game will take care of you soon enough.

http://www.slate.com...nfl_coach_.html

PRO:

Why jump a kneeldown? Because it worked two years ago.

From: Barry Petchesky|Posted Monday, Sept. 17, 2012, at 2:45 PM ET

To: Josh Levin

Oh god, here we go. We're about to get into a big discussion of the unwritten rules of football. And if you're not a fan of baseball, where this flares up every few months, it's going to be miserable, and I'll tell you exactly how it's going to go. It's a seven-step process:

1) Young coach does something that riles up old coach. In this case, Greg Schiano's Bucs failed to meekly let the Giants run their victory formation, and actually tells his defense to try to make a football play in a football game. With the Giants kneeling with five seconds left, the Tampa Bay line puts Eli Manning on his ass. There's pushing, there's shoving, but all in all, it's by an order of magnitude less violent than any other play all day.

2) Old coach gets furious. A red-faced Tom Coughlin confronts Schiano in lieu of a friendly handshake, yelling things about "in my day" and "play the game the right way." Probably. This is a dog whistle for moralists, because if there's anything with more sanctity than a kneeldown, it's the post-game handshake. Gentlemen, take your marks.

3) Aggrieved team makes its case. These postgame quotes tend to fall into two categories, neither possessing much in the way of logical argument against the action itself:

"You just don't see that."

Eli Manning: "That was a first."

Chris Snee: "It's just something you don't see at this level."

Sean Locklear: "It's nothing I've ever seen."

"You just don't do that."

Tom Coughlin: "I don't think you do that at this level."

John Mara: "You just don't do that in the NFL."

4) Offending coach appeals to sense. "There's nothing dirty about it and there's nothing illegal about it," Schiano told reporters. "We crowd the ball—it's like a sneak defense and you try to knock it loose." That this is a novel concept—trying to force a turnover when a turnover is the only possible way your team can win—speaks to how unimaginative playcalling has gotten. And when a college coach arrives who's not yet ingrained with the bizarre gentlemen's agreements of the NFL, and offers a better alternative, what happens? He's vilified. Eh, save it. Football stopped being a gentlemen's game the day they decided to let people tackle each other.

5) Crusty columnists support crusty coach because he's "old-school" and his teams "play the game the right way." This one's as predictable as the changing of the seasons. First the hometown, then the national columnists fight to be first in line to condemn anyone daring to offend the honor of the game. These are delightful—moral outrage indistinguishable from a pastiche of moral outrage.

Mark Cannizzaro, New York Post:

Schiano's behavior at the end of yesterday's bitter 41-34 loss to the Giants at MetLife Stadium, when his team failed to protect a two-touchdown lead late in the third quarter, was pathetic and unacceptable. Schiano's decision to order his players to bull rush the Giants offense while it was in the "victory formation'' to run the clock out on the last play of a game they already had won was something out of the WWE.

Dan Graziano, ESPN.com:

It also shows a lack of respect. It's sore-losership. You've been beaten, fair and square, in the part of the game in which both teams were competing honestly. To try to win it cheaply with a sneaky play after the opposing team (and any other opposing team you've ever faced or ever will face) justifiably believes it to have been decided is dishonest and dishonorable.

Yes, these are the same columnists who call for Coughlin's firing every season around Week 8 because he's not getting full effort from his players.

6) Someone points out that the "dirty play" is just smart football. Ooh, I'll do it! Anyone remember Troy-Oklahoma State in 2010? (Former Trojan and current Giant Jerrel Jernigan sure does.)

O.K. State had the ball with a minute left and a three-point lead, and attempted to kneel to run out the game clock. But Brandon Weeden fumbled the snap, and the Trojans, sending their front three over the top, recovered the ball.

They'd fumble it back on their first play from scrimmage, but that's not the point—the point is that they never would have had the chance if their linemen had just stood up when the Cowboys entered the victory formation.

What's being missed is that the Bucs' rush wasn't designed to force a fumble (not nearly enough time for that, if the snap goes smoothly), but rather to be able to jump on a loose ball should the Giants inexplicably put it on the ground. Which has been known to happen around here. In a game in which Eli Manning had already turned the ball over three times, why not force him to make one final play? Yes, a kneeldown is a play—and the fact that it's covered by the written rules ought to be enough to keep this out of the realm of the imaginary.

7) Everyone yells for a while and then goes home. We've got, like, two more days of this before everyone forgets it ever happened. (The NFL has already said it has no issue with the play.) The unwritten rules are allowed to remain unremarked upon until the next time an old coach invokes them

http://www.slate.com...years_ago_.html