Buccaneers Still Making Tweaks After Big Victory

Coming off a 45-point setback at San Francisco, the Bucs jumped headfirst back into the NFC South race Sunday by grinding out a 26-20 win over New Orleans.

Tampa's season outlook was shaky at best a week ago thanks to inconsistent quarterback play, a defense stuck in the middle pack among its peers and key injuries to running back LeGarrette Blount and defensive tackle Gerald McCoy.

Now heading into this week's trip to London for a matchup with Chicago, the Bucs are hoping the resolve they showed on both sides of the ball against the Saints will go a long way in changing the early perceptions about them.

"I got a bunch of tough guys on this football team and no matter what happens, anybody may be considered a star," Morris said. "It's always going to be the next man theory...These guys know how to move on to the next game."

Tampa entered the New Orleans game ranked just 23rd in total defense and 20th in offense, but played well above those numbers Sunday.

The improvement was particularly noticeable on defense where the Bucs forced four turnovers — including three interceptions of Saints quarterback Drew Brees — while allowing New Orleans a touchdown on just one of its four red zone opportunities.

Tampa is now plus-2 in turnover margin for the season and was the biggest takeaway from the win, Morris said, for a unit that played without McCoy, who was out with an ankle injury.

"We're streaky I guess, we're like John Starks, we come out hot some days and some days we're not," Morris said. "But we are on fire and back in, we got the hop-step we've been missing the last couple of weeks, and that's what we've got to be."

Avoiding turnovers was also key for Tampa's offense and they were turnover-free thanks to one of quarterback Josh Freeman's best efforts of the season.

He completed just 23 of 41 passes, but had two touchdown passes and 303 passing yards. His final quarterback rating for the day was a less than stellar 95.9, but well above the season average of 74.1 he entered the game with.

His leadership was needed without the services Sunday of Blount, who sat out with a knee injury. He will likely miss his second straight game this week.

Earnest Graham did play well in Blount's place, rushing for 109 yards. But at 31 years old and in his eighth season the Bucs probably can't count on that production on a weekly basis if Blount doesn't return to action quickly.

Still, Graham said he's ready to step in as long as he's needed to, but isn't focusing on having to fill that role long term.

"I never felt entitled to being the starting running back or to anything," Graham said. "When you feel that way and just handle your work and handle your career, you want to be able to step up and be ready when it's time."

Freeman said the pieces are certainly there for the Bucs to be playoff team, though there is still a lot of room for growth as they continue a challenging six-game stretch against teams with a combined record of 24-11.

"We're a young team, we're a good team, but at the same time, it comes down to preparation and execution and if we can keep that at a high level," Freeman said. "It's Week 6, nothing's decided at this point, and every win is extremely valuable."

Cornerback E.J. Biggers said it's why nobody in the Bucs' locker room thinks that all of their early season issues are completely behind them.

"We left some plays out there on the field," he said. "It's going to be like that every game. Something going to happen that you could correct and get better at. We are going to do that and get better and keep growing as a team." __

Follow Kyle Hightower on Twitter: www.twitter.com/khightower

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Analysis: Tweaks in B.C.S. Could Results From Conference Changes

Those were the good old days, before a wave of off-the-field scandal and realignment uncertainty engulfed the sport, the real-time drama distracting everyone from the annual end-of-season headaches.

But with the release of the B.C.S. standings Sunday night, the potential for college football’s season to end with a lot of unhappy undefeated teams became clear. There are nine undefeated teams that could make a case that they should play for the title — sorry, No. 19 Houston, you’re not one of them — and yet another awkward finish appears likely.

But perhaps more important, with so much big-picture change brewing, the biggest question among the sport’s administrators is whether the shifts in conferences’ makeup will result in significant changes to the B.C.S.

As the tumult of conference expansion has defined the past three months, the B.C.S. coordinator, Bill Hancock, has been calling commissioners and administrators to brainstorm about potential changes. The B.C.S. contract expires at the end of the 2013 regular season, and Hancock said a mechanism had been set up for B.C.S. leadership to discuss potential changes. Hancock said changes would be determined in the next calendar year, as they have to be prepared to be presented to ESPN for its exclusive negotiation window by next fall.

“Because it is so early in the process, it wouldn’t be appropriate to even try to describe the general direction right now, except to say that I am hearing little to no sentiment for an F.C.S.-style playoff,” Hancock wrote in an e-mail Sunday. He was referring to the Football Championship Subdivision, which has a playoff format for its national title.

Hancock added that the integrity of the regular season and the bowl experience were priorities to be preserved, which are familiar talking points. The party line from university presidents has always been that a playoff in college football would interfere with academics, spoil the regular season and professionalize a sport that is having difficulty rationalizing its vestiges of amateurism.

But even with conferences seemingly growing as fast as television contracts are increasing in value, the resistance to extreme change in the B.C.S. is severe.

The Big Ten commissioner, Jim Delany, who has long been an advocate of the sport’s vibrant regular season and his league’s relationship with the Rose Bowl, said it was a leap to think that bigger leagues were a gateway to a playoff system.

“That’s not a logical conclusion,” he said in a phone interview Sunday. “The reasons people do or don’t judge a viewpoint on the system is not related to the size of a conference.”

There are a few possible B.C.S. discussions that everyday fans would care about. That would include adding a B.C.S. bowl game — the Cotton Bowl is commonly mentioned — to increase the number of B.C.S. bids and changing the limit of two teams per conference for B.C.S. games.

During the build-up to the current B.C.S. contract, there was a formal discussion of whether leagues would favor the so-called Plus One model, which would essentially have the top four teams play off in the B.C.S.

Just moving to have a discussion about the Plus One model was a big deal, and only the commissioners Mike Slive of the Southeastern Conference and John Swofford of the Atlantic Coast Conference favored it. There was so little interest that a vote wasn’t even taken.

Plus One was ultimately seen as a gateway to a bigger playoff, and college football still appears a long way from trending in that direction. During the expansion boom the past two years, a common refrain was that the march toward 16-team superconferences would inevitably lead to a playoff.

Delany said he did not see that.

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