Bucs Steer In Wrong Direction

(Get it? "Steer"? The Texans' mascot is a cow!)

I'm not going to be too hard on Luke McCown for this loss because it mostly wasn't his fault. There were times he held onto the ball too long and that overthrow of Joey Galloway could have made the difference in the game, but for the most part he played it safe and took few chances which is generally what you want your backup to do.

A lot of blame has to sit with the offensive line. Again, having to choose for some reason between run-blocking and pass-blocking, yesterday they chose to run-block. Arron Sears was beaten by Earl Cochran, Donald Penn was beaten by N.D. Kalu, Davin Joseph was beaten by Amobi Okoye and Jeremy Trueblood was beaten by Mario Williams. And John Wade should just be beaten. All of the exceptional centers are locked up in multi-year deals, so the team needs to either get Dan Buenning off his ass or draft a center in 2008.

Hey, Michael Clayton looked good. That's something, right?

Earnest Graham has been fantastic running the ball, but three drops to six catches is not a good ratio.

Will someone tell me why the Bucs traded away two draft picks for Michael Bennett if they aren't going to use him? Christ, the man doesn't have to memorize the whole playbook. Just a few specialty plays that get him into open space. One big play from him would have given the team a nice spark. Maybe a punt return? Something?

It seemed like the Bucs defense started to bring serious quarterback pressure in the last two games, so I'm not sure why they would go back to playing a basic Cover 2 for this game. Sage Rosenfels absolutely ate up the Bucs defense with the short passes because he had all day to throw. They played Houston the same way they played Indianapolis, and got exactly the same result.

The exception, of course, is Greg White who did everything he could possibly do. Three sacks, two other tackles, a pass defensed and two forced fumbles.

Gaines Adams is the only other player credited with a "quarterback hurry". This was a beaten up Houston offensive line, too. There's no reason why the Bucs defensive tackles couldn't get more pressure on the quarterback and make that soft Cover 2 work.

Barrett Ruud had a busy day. He got six tackles on the day, but got beat by Andre Johnson for one pass when Rosenfels got the mismatch we was looking for. He also missed a tackle on Darius Walker.

Actually, tackling seemed kind of weak overall yesterday. I can think of tackles that Derrick Brooks, Ronde Barber and Brian Kelly all missed.

Speaking of Barber, he was the leading tackler for the day with ten. Ouch.

Let's be fair to the defense. The Texans had scoring drives of 23 and 17 yards and a kickoff return. But instead of making the Texans kick field goals, they got touchdowns. And when the defense really needed a stop on third down, it seemed like the Texans were always converting and grinding down the clock. Ski called this one right on the money when he said, "This has the smell of a trap game for the Bucs as they are going on the road following a big division game." That's exactly what this was. It's hard to believe that the team took this game as seriously as they take NFC games and it played like to was preseason.