It's Friday. That means it's Buccaneers Trivia Time! (This also holds true for Monday through Thursday.)
As I explained on Tuesday, I will be posting a daily trivia question about the Buccaneers each work day in the month of April, just to give us all a small diversion from the difficulties of the current situation. Hopefully you learned a little bit about Tampa Bay's draft history yesterday. On Thursday, you were asked to deduce which player in team history had caught at least 10 passes in a season the most times. Today, we're going to look at the guys who throw the passes.
Our Daily Bucs Trivia question will be posted here each workday at 10:00 a.m. ET, and then also shared on Twitter. At 4:00 p.m. ET, I'll update the story to include the answer and share that on Twitter as well. There's no prize, just the pride you'll get from knowing your team and its history well. And this isn't multiple choice; you'll have to figure out the answer for yourself.
Now, obviously, the answers to some of these questions will be relatively easy to look up online. See if you can challenge yourself first before resorting to that solution.
Bucs Daily Trivia Question, April 3:
You probably know, or could easily guess, who holds the Buccaneers' record for career touchdown passes. That would be Jameis Winston, with 121. He's followed by Josh Freeman (80), Vinny Testaverde (77) and Doug Williams (73).
You might even know that Trent Dilfer has the most wins as a starting quarterback (38) in team history. Next on that list are Williams (33), Winston (28) and Brad Johnson (26).
What you probably don't know is how those two categories intersect for Winston, Williams and all the quarterbacks in franchise history. By that I mean touchdown passes that were thrown by each quarterback in games that the Buccaneers won. That's the basic gist of today's trivia question, which is, specifically:
What Buccaneers quarterback threw the highest percentage of his touchdown passes in games that the Buccaneers won?
So if Bob McQuarterback threw 32 touchdown passes as a Buccaneer, and 16 of them came in games in which Tampa Bay won, that would be 50% of his overall total. The answer to this question, by the way, threw 84.62% of his Buccaneer touchdown passes in victories.
A couple of clarifications:
- We're considering any games in which a quarterback threw a touchdown pass, not just ones that he started.
- We're setting the minimum number of career touchdown passes as a Buccaneer to 10. Otherwise, the answer to this question would be Mike Hold and Chuck Fusina, who threw two and one touchdown passes, respectively, in single relief appearances.
- We are confining this to the regular season, not preseason or the playoffs.
Got it? Good! Come back at 4:00 p.m. ET for the answer!
Answer: The Buccaneer quarterback who threw the highest percentage of his touchdown passes in games that his team won is Shaun King.
King threw 26 touchdown passes as a Buccaneer, most but not all of them in the 21 games he started between the last month of the 1999 season and all of 2000. Of those 26 touchdown passes, 22 came in game the Buccaneers won, with only four coming in losses. That means, 84.62% of all his TD throws came in victories.
Next on the list is Dilfer, who had 70 touchdown tosses as a Buccaneer, with 48 of them coming in wins, or 68.57%. That's just ahead of Chris Simms, who had only 12 touchdown passes as a Buccaneer but got exactly two-thirds of them in victories.
At the other end of the list is a Hall of Famer and Super Bowl champion. Steve Young was drafted by the Buccaneers after the USFL folded and played two seasons in Tampa before being traded to San Francisco. Young, who clearly proved to be a marvelous talent, was on two very, very bad Buccaneers teams in 1985 and 1985. He threw 11 touchdown passes during that time, but all of them came in losses. He's the only qualifier on the list not to have any of his TD passes come in a win.
