On Wednesday, the National Football League judged Buccaneer QB Shaun King to be its best offensive player in the NFC last weekend. That same day, a panel of media veterans brought together by Miller Lite agreed, but did them one better.
King's second award of Wednesday, which was presented to him after practice by Lee Roy Selmon, the only Tampa Bay Buccaneer in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, was the Miller Lite NFL Player of the Week.
The Miller Lite NFL Player of the Week program doesn't differentiate between offense and defense or AFC and NFC. A player is chosen each week from each NFL team, then the award-winner is selected from among those 31 players. The Hall of Fame coordinates the voting program, which helps to explain Selmon's presence. For King, a Bay area native, it was particularly special to receive the award from a player he grew up admiring.
"This was a guy that I grew up (watching), and he was a guy that stood out on a lot of teams that were average," said King of Selmon. "It takes a special player to stay positive through a lot of seasons that weren't successful and to play at the level he played. He's a guy that I have a healthy respect for, and a guy that I'm really looking forward to working with in the future on different things in the community."
Selmon, of course, is impressed with King as well, particularly after the young QB's stellar outing on Sunday. In just his 13th NFL start, King led the Bucs past the previously undefeated Minnesota Vikings, 41-13, by throwing a career-high four touchdown passes. The second-year player completed 16 of 23 passes for 267 yards and no interceptions.
King immediately shared the honor with his teammates, who helped the offense rack up a season-best 413 yards of offense.
"I felt throughout the week that we had real good practices," said King of last week's preparations. "I thought we'd done a good job of being on the details and being mistake-free in practice. When you do that, it sort of translates over to the game. Then our defense got us the momentum early by giving us the ball, and we scored."
Still, King wasn't expecting any awards.
"I was surprised," he said. "There's a lot of guys that go out every week and do a great job. We had lost four in a row, so I wasn't sure they were going to give us any awards. We hadn't gotten an award in awhile.
"It goes like that sometimes. It's been like that since I was playing Little League. You have a bad game, and you can't do it. You have a good game and you can. I have to give a lot of the credit to the other 10 guys. They did a great job on Sunday of making my job easy."
