Buccaneers.com | News - Turning Back the Clock: 1979, Part 1

QB Doug Williams, now the Bucs' director of pro personnel, remembers the heady days of the first two months of the 1979 season

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Turning Back the Clock: 1979, Part 1

Nov 01, 2009 - (Editor’s Note: On November 8, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers will play a throwback game against the Green Bay Packers, donning the orange-and-white uniforms and the Bucco Bruce helmets for the first time since 1996. While the uniforms the Buccaneers will wear are based on the original togs of the franchise’s 1976 inaugural season, the team will also take the opportunity to honor the 1979 team that stunned the NFL by advancing to the NFC Championship Game. What follows is the first half of a two-part look back at that landmark ’79 campaign.)

It took five wins, and then the fledgling Tampa Bay Buccaneers of 1979 knew they were for real.

Those Buccaneers, just four years into franchise existence in an era that gave expansion teams far fewer advantages than the ones that would come later, amazed the NFL galaxy by winning their first five games of 1979. But those are not the five victories that established the team's hidden confidence.

Rather, it was the five Ws, balanced by 11 Ls, of the 1978 season that set the stage for one of the most remarkably successful seasons in league annals. Now, 5-11 may not seem like much to get excited about, but these same Buccaneers had spent their first two seasons, 1976 and 1977, enduring 26 straight losses before two breakthrough wins at the end of '77.

Those five wins of '78 – not to mention the league's 4th-best defensive numbers, a number of other very close games and the addition of first-round quarterback Doug Williams – resulted in a 1979 team that believed in itself far more than the rest of the league realized.

"We got out of the gates early. We were 5-0 and feeling good about ourselves. We had a motto: 'Ain't No Stopping Us Now.'"

With a roster that had lost very little from 1978 but added rookies Gordon Jones, Jerry Eckwood, Greg Roberts and David Logan, the Buccaneers went into their fourth season truly expecting to compete. Perhaps even they didn't expect to match their 1978 win total in the season's first five weeks, though.

"I think '78 was a season that gave us confidence for the '79 season," said Williams, who is now the Buccaneers' director of pro personnel. Going into '78, the team had only won two games out of 28. The '78 season we were able to win five games, and I missed seven games because of a broken jaw. I think the confidence was there because we felt like there were pieces of the puzzle coming together. We had all the pieces in place going into '79 and we kind of felt like we had the opportunity to compete."

Tampa Bay had actually lost their last four games of 1978, but they still felt confident hosting the Detroit Lions, who had gone 7-9 the year before, in the season opener. And, indeed, the Bucs raced out to a 24-7 halftime lead en route to a 31-16 victory. Only three times in 1978 had Tampa Bay even scored 24 points in an entire game, but the offense of ’79 had some new tricks up its sleeve. Eckwood, the third-round pick out of Arkansas who would prove to be such a perfect complement to Ricky Bell, burst out of the gates with 121 rushing yards and the Bucs kept it on the ground 48 times for 229 total yards. Plus, the great Lee Roy Selmon, who often set up touchdowns for other Buc defenders during his career with sack-fumbles, scored for the first time since high school on a fumble return in the first quarter, and the Bucs never looked back.

The Bucs went on the road the following week and this time were on the wrong end of a fast start, as the Baltimore Colts rolled up 17 unanswered points in the first quarter. The real story of the game, though, was the Buccaneers’ pass rush, which rang up an incredible 10 sacks of Colts quarterback Greg Landry, two each by Selmon, Randy Crowder and David Lewis.

Turnovers and penalties had helped the Buccaneers dig that 17-point hole to a team that finished 5-11 in 1978, but Tampa Bay rallied quickly, scoring the game’s next four touchdowns. Trailing 17-13, the visitors took their first lead early in the fourth quarter when cornerback Mike Washington returned an interception 49 yards for a score. The Bucs padded their lead four minutes later when Head Coach John McKay picked the perfect time to trade off his team’s power running game.

“I remember how we scored our last touchdown – Gordon Jones caught a long TD pass,” said Williams. “It was third-and-short and we faked a run. We faked a blast up the middle with Ricky Bell and Gordon Jones was on the wing like a blocker. He was a big, strong guy, a Michael Clayton body-type. We faked the run and he was running wide open.”

It was third-and-three from the Baltimore 37, to be exact, and the rookie Jones sold his block before breaking out into the open for Williams’ pass. That score put the Bucs up 26-17, but two missed extra points along the way actually kept the game within reach. The Colts stunningly missed their extra point, too, after a fourth-quarter touchdown, so their field goal with 90 seconds left only tied the game, sending it into overtime. The Bucs’ 10th sack, by Crowder, caused a fumble that Bill Kollar recovered to set up Neil O’Donoghue’s 31-yard game-winning field goal.

Game Three in 1979 was on the road against the Green Bay Packers, who were 8-7-1 in 1978 but were a team against which the Bucs felt confident. Tampa Bay had lost twice to Green Bay in 1978, both times in close games, but they would go on to win five of the next six, with the other game resulting in the only tie in franchise history.

The two wins had bolstered that quiet confidence, and the Bucs wanted to keep it going in Wisconsin.

“Green Bay was always a team that we did well against in those years,” said Williams. “Winning that game gave us more confidence that we were going to matriculate to the playoffs. That was the whole object, to get to the playoffs. We were only four years old as a team and we had the 0-26 history, and we were trying to eliminate the fact that we came from being the worst team. It was 'Worst to First,' that was the motto. We wanted to make sure we didn't end up the way we were before.”

This game helped. The Bucs once again relied on their ground game, as Eckwood and Bell produced 99 and 97 yards, respectively, and Eckwood ripped off a 40-yard carry for the game’s first touchdown. Bell would later score two times, once each on a pass and a run, as the Bucs prevailed 21-10. Selmon had two more sacks as the Bucs dropped Green Bay quarterback David Whitehurst three times.

Next up was a home game against the Los Angeles Rams, who would prove to be the Bucs’ opponent in the conference title game at the end of the season. The Bucs’ defense, now gathering steam, was almost unassailable, allowing just 186 yards, and the Rams’ lone points in a 21-6 defeat came on a Jim Youngblood interception return.

Selmon continued his hot streak, racking up two more sacks and causing two fumbles in the process. One led to a Ricky Bell touchdown in the second quarter, and Williams also threw touchdown passes in that period to Larry Mucker and Jimmie Giles.

Tampa Bay went back on the road in Week Five, heading to Chicago to face Walter Payton and the Chicago Bears. Tampa Bay jumped out to a 10-0 lead thanks in large part to Eckwood’s 61-yard touchdown run on the first play of the second quarter. It was still 13-6 in the Bucs’ favor four minutes into the final period when Payton – who was limited to 48 yards on the ground – took a short pass and turned it into a 65-yard touchdown.

The newly-resilient Bucs answered right back with a 10-play touchdown drive on which eight of the snaps were runs by either Bell or Eckwood. On third-and-two from the Chicago eight, however, Williams went to the air, throwing an eight-yard touchdown pass to Isaac Hagins for the winning points. Cedric Brown and Jeris White sealed the win with interceptions on the Bears’ last two possessions.

The 1979 Bucs were certainly feeling their oats.

“We got out of the gates early,” said Williams. “We were 5-0 and feeling good about ourselves. We had a motto: 'Ain't No Stopping Us Now.' We used to play that song every morning in the dressing room. It was Batman Wood's job to play that song every day. We went to play the Giants 5-0 and were feeling pretty good.”

The Buccaneers were the only undefeated team in the NFL after five weeks, and they had already nearly doubled the franchise’s all-time win total. They were the talk of the NFL, but a trip to New York loomed. Despite their record, the Bucs were obviously not perfect and, according to Williams, it was a lingering injury from 1978 that helped slow down the Bucs’ roll to start the ’79 campaign.

Fullback Jimmy DuBose had proved to be a powerful part of the team’s running game in ’78, rushing for 338 yards in just six games. He ran a play called “16-17 Belly” particularly well, and though the team’s primary 1979 fullback, Johnny Davis, was a talented player, he wasn’t as good of a fit for that play. The Bucs added Eckwood in 1979, and he was obviously a significant weapon, gaining 690 rushing yards to Bell’s 1,293, but he brought a different dynamic to the attack.

“With Jimmy running that and Ricky Bell going off tackle or blasting up the middle, we had a pretty good combination,” said Williams. “With Jimmie Giles and Morris Owens and Larry Mucker and Isaac Hagins, all those guys, we had some pretty good skill players. But when Jimmy went down we kind of lost the continuity in the backfield. Johnny Davis was our backup fullback but Jimmy was a different type of runner than Johnny. It kind of changed our offense a little bit. We got beat up there in New York and we kind of came down and realized that every game wasn't going to be a win. We realized we had to find a way to win each week, and that's what we started to do.”

But not right away.

The Bucs were certainly not overwhelmed by the Giants. New York quarterback Phil Simms completed just six of 12 passes for 37 yards and was sacked twice. The Giants did run for 202 yards, but the Bucs held the overall yardage advantage, 273-220. But Williams was picked off three times and the visitors failed on an onside kick try after Williams’ 11-yard TD pass to Giles late in the fourth quarter.

The Bucs were no longer perfect, and their next game would prove to be their worst of the season, and most inexplicable. The visiting New Orleans Saints, who would finish 8-8 in 1979 after going 7-9 the year before, erupted for six second-half touchdowns to beat Tampa Bay, 42-14. No other team scored more than three TDs against Tampa Bay in 1979.

The game was actually scoreless at halftime, and the Bucs took the game’s first lead on Hagins 22-yard TD catch after Bell’s 49-yard run on the first play of the second half. That’s when the Saints turned on the jets, as Archie Manning tied the game on a TD run and later threw a scoring pass in the same quarter. The Bucs’ amazing pass rush never got to Manning once, and Chuck Muncie led a 234-yard rushing performance by the Saints.

“We were on top of the world,” said Williams. “We thought we were unbeatable and the balloon got inflated a little bit.”

The Bucs didn’t stay down for long, however, turning back to their rushing game and that familiar opponent, the Packers, to get back into the winning column. On the final day of the first half of the season, Tampa Bay completed the first half of the 1979 season with a dominant 21-3 win over Green Bay at Tampa Stadium. Bell plowed through the Green Bay defense 28 times for 167 yards as the Bucs ran for 228 yards overall. Williams was only asked to throw 10 times but he completed six of them, two for touchdowns. Tampa Bay was up 14-3 at halftime and never let the visiting Packers back into the game.

That left the Buccaneers at 6-2 with eight games to go and both the Bears and Minnesota Vikings challenging them for NFC Central superiority. As it turned out, their Week Five win at Chicago would prove to be a critical game in the season-ending tiebreaking procedures, but at this point the Bucs only knew that they had to build on what had carried them to one of the league’s best records.

“Our defense was as good or better than we expected it to be and our running game was really working,” said Williams. “Ricky Bell picked up about 1,200 yards that year and Jerry Eckwood was a complement to him. Jerry was more of a quick-footed, finesse guy, a guy who could catch the ball out of the backfield and make people miss. Ricky Bell was your high-stepping, break a tackle at the line of scrimmage and get extra yards guy. We would need them both.”

And much more, as it turned out, to win the first division title in team history and turn the expectations for a 1970s franchise team on its head. The 6-2 first-half record was where it began in 1979; in the second half, the Buccaneers would go to places they had never been before.

Later this week: Part 2 of Turning Back the Clock to 1979.