Ladies and gentlemen, the Answer Man was wrong.
I'm not talking about typo-wrong or left-one-name-off-a-list wrong. I'm not even talking about seeing the light about a difference of opinions.
I mean to say the Answer Man was completely, spectacularly, dead wrong. I fielded a question, looked up what I believed to be the correct answer, checked a few sources here in the building who agreed with me, and printed it as if it was fact.
And it was not fact.
I hope you will forgive me.
Here's how it went down. In a little column I cleverly titled, "The Answer Man, Series 6, Volume 11," I took a question from Nate of Rochester, New York regarding the new playoff overtime rules. The question essentially boiled down to this: "If the team kicking off to start overtime successfully executes an onside kick and then kicks a field goal, is the game over or does the other team still get a possession."
On the plus side, I told Nate that it was a "great, great question." On the minus side, I also said it was "easy." Why, oh why did I do that?
The answer I gave Nate was this: Yes, the team that originally lined up to receive the opening kickoff would still get a possession. The basic gist of my explanation was that the receiving team had never possessed the ball when the kicking team executed the onside kick, as that play is not actually considered a turnover. By that logic, the kicking team became the team with the first possession and the original receiving team became the "other" team. With that decided (or so I thought) I went on to a pithy discussion about whether this rule change would make a team more or less likely to try that ultra-risky gambit in overtime.
I suppose that could have been the end of the story, but yesterday I started flipping through the NFL's official kickoff release for the 2010 season. It took a lot of flipping; that sucker is 107 pages long, with notes on just about everything and everyone imaginable in the NFL! (Did you know that Dolphins Defensive Coordinator Paul Pasqualoni thinks Josh Freeman "has great poise?" Now you do.)
One page was called "Postseason Overtime Changes." I decided to skim over it just to see if there was anything about the topic I hadn't yet heard. That's when I started to detect the unmistakable taste crow.
Here's the passage that grabbed my attention: "Each team must possess or have the opportunity to possess the ball unless the team that has the ball first scores a touchdown on its initial possession." (Emphasis added.)
"Opportunity to possess?" "Opportunity?" Uh oh.
On the bottom of the page, those heartless dream-crushers even took the time to define "opportunity to possess." It reads: "The opportunity to possess occurs only during kicking plays. A kickoff is an opportunity to possess for the receiving team. If the kicking team legally recovers the kick, the receiving team is considered to have had its opportunity..."
Does that mean what I'm afraid it means? (That's what I thought at the time; at this point, I already know that my fears were confirmed.) Fortunately for me (if you want to put it that way) an NFL officiating crew happened to be visiting that very day. Crews go to every team's camp in order to go over the league's rule changes and to work a practice or two. I wasted no time. Right in the middle of practice I marched up to two of the crew's supervisors and laid out Nate's situation point blank.
And I was wrong. Did I mention that earlier?
Because the kickoff is an opportunity for the receiving team to possess, if that team is duped by an onside kick then it just had one opportunity in overtime, and failed to score on it. That means the team recovering the kick can win the game with a field goal, just like with the old sudden death rules.
So, Nate, I hope you're reading this and I'm sorry I led you astray. At least we all know the truth now. So we've got that going for us. Which is nice.
And before we move on, let's look again at whether or not the new overtime rules in the playoffs would make a team more or less likely to try to pull off an onside kick in the extra period. Now, the Answer Man still thinks it's enormously unlikely that any coach would take such a gamble, since it could bring about a very sudden end to his team's season. However, I also think the new rules make it just slightly more likely that a team would try it.
There are two things that can happen if you try an onside kick. You recover the ball or your opponent gets possession already on your side of the field. Under the first circumstance, with the new overtime rules, the kicking team would now only need about 25 or 30 yards to kick a field goal, and then the other team would not get a chance to respond. The kicking team would no longer have to score a touchdown to deny its opponent a chance at the football.
Now, it's obviously terrible if your opponent recovers the ball, as they would probably have it at about your 40, with only a very short way to go for the go-ahead field goal. Under the old rules, that would be an unmitigated disaster; once they kick that field goal, the game is over. But under the new rules, as long as you can keep them from scoring a touchdown, you're going to have a shot at the ball anyway. I could see a coach gambling that, if the risky onside kick didn't work, at least his defense could prevent a touchdown and keep the game alive.
And now, as penance for my mistake, I'm here to file another Q&A column, right in the middle of camp. I hadn't planned on resurfacing until later in the month, after the rush of camp was over, and I still won't be able to get to more than two or three of your questions. But here I am to offer up a few more answers that will hopefully absolve me of my overtime rules flop.
And, hey, maybe the answers will even be right! Let's go...
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- Jim Wozniak of Tampa, Florida asks:
Hypothetically, if a team exceeds the salary cap by a handful of its players meeting huge incentives, for whatever reason, how is this handled by NFL and team? Do they have to cut cap next year? If so, didn't they sort of win by cheating? See NY Yankees.
Answer Man: Hey, c'mon! Why do I have to answer salary cap questions in a season in which we don't even have a salary cap? Not fair!
Then again, this is penance, so I guess I can't complain. Plus, the dig on the Yankees pretty much guaranteed I was printing this one. Nice work, Jim.
The short answer is that an NFL team pretty much can't blow past its salary cap by having a bunch of players reach incentives. See, a majority of the incentives put into any given contract do count against the cap.
First you must understand that there are two types of incentives that can be included in a player's contract: LTBE incentives and NLTBE incentives. LBTE stands for "likely to be earned." I'm going out on a limb and guessing you can figure out what NLBTE thus stands for. Here's the important part: All LTBE incentives are counted against the cap, as if they had already occurred when the contract is signed.
Likely to be earned incentives are what they sound like, statistical milestones or simple achievements that the player will probably hit. If they are statistical-milestone incentives - say, the player will catch 50 passes in 2010 - they are based on what the player and/or the team did the year before. If the player in question caught 50 or more passes in 2009, he is officially considered likely to do so in 2010. If it is something solely in the player's control, such as a weight limit or a reporting bonus, it is also an LBTE incentive.
Not likely to be earned incentives are also what they sound like, and for a great example you might want to check out Ricky Williams' infamous first contract with the New Orleans Saints. The incentives built into that one were so hard to achieve that Williams only got to one of 25 of them by the end of his rookie season. Ouch.
NLTBE incentives do not count against the salary cap when the contract is signed, and of course they never will count if they are not reached.
So back to your original question, the only way a team could do anything like what you describe is if they have a player or multiple players with really big NLTBEs in their deal, and then those players reach those NLTBEs. If that very unlikely event happened, the team would pay for it next year. All of the NLTBE's reached by a team's players in a given year are compared to all of the LTBE's reached. If the NLTBE total is higher than the LTBE (again this is very unlikely) then the team will have its salary cap decreased the next year.
Conversely, if for some reason a bunch of LTBEs are not reached by a team's players, a team can get a credit on its cap the next season, since it was already hit by those LTBEs even though they didn't happen. If the amount of non-reached LTBE "credits" is higher than the NLTBEs that were achieved, the difference will be added to the cap the next year.
Confusing, huh? Something tells me we haven't heard the last of this topic, even in an uncapped year. Let's just say its LBTEA - likely to be explained again.
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- Dan Søgård of Hjerm, Denmark asks:
Who is the QB with the highest QB rating in Bucs history?
Answer Man: Dan, I'll give you the answer in three parts: Career, single-season and game. I'm guessing you were looking for the Buc quarterback with the best career passer rating, but that wouldn't take up enough space here, so I'm branching out.
One needs 50 passes to qualify for the career lead in this category in the Bucs' record book, or otherwise the answer would be the great James Wilder, who also stands as Tampa Bay's all-time leading rusher and all-time leading pass-catcher. Wilder threw one pass in his career, resulting in a 16-yard touchdown and a perfect 158.3 passer rating.
Among the actual qualifiers, your winner is...Jeff Garcia! Over two seasons and 703 passes, Garcia compiled a quite nice passer rating of 92.2. That just edges out Luke McCown's 91.0, but McCown threw only 140 passes as a Buccaneer, so it would have been hard to accept him as the all-time leader anyway. Tim Rattay is third! He had an 88.2 rating in 101 passes. Brian Griese is fifth at 85.5 (on 694 passes) and Brad Johnson rounds out the top five at 83.2.
It's worth noting that Johnson was with the Bucs for four seasons and threw 1,683 passes, which is almost exactly as many as the four passers above him on the list threw as Buccaneers (1,638). For this reason, if you wanted to adopt Johnson as the unofficial passer-rating leader in team history, the Answer Man wouldn't try to talk you out if it, even if it wasn't technically true. He is the the only player in team history with more than 1,000 passes as a Buccaneer and a passer rating over 80.
The best single-season passer rating turned in by a Buccaneer was the 97.5 Griese managed in 2004. That was on 336 passes, as Johnson started the first four games of that season and Chris Simms started the fifth. Still, the minimum to be considered for this record is 150 passes, so Griese easily makes the cutoff. Garcia's 94.6 rating on 327 passes in 2007 is next on the list and third is the 92.9 posted by Johnson in the 2002 Super Bowl year. Johnson threw 451 passes that season.
And even though the Buccaneers do not compile a list of the best single-game passer rating performances in team history, the Answer Man happens to know who is on the top of that list. That's because I happen to be privy to a list of all of the games in NFL history in which a quarterback achieved a perfect 158.3 rating. There are 35 different men on the list, which includes both regular-season and postseason games, and one of those men was a Tampa Bay Buccaneer.
On September 11, 1994, Craig Erickson, in just his 17th NFL start, led the Bucs to a 24-10 win over Indianapolis by completing 19 of 24 passes for 313 yards, three touchdowns and no interceptions. Passer rating is determined by combining scores in four different categories: completion percentage, yards per pass attempt, touchdowns per pass attempt and interceptions per pass attempt. In each category, there is a sliding scale of scores corresponding to the player's stats; each scale has a highest possible number that can be achieved. In other words, completing 100% of your passes won't score you any better than completing 95% of your passes, as both accomplishments return the highest possible number on that scale.
Erickson scored as high as he could in all four and got what some call a "perfect game" for a quarterback, a 158.3 rating. Only six quarterbacks have ever done this more than once: Peyton Manning (four times), Ben Roethlisberger and Kurt Warner (three each) and Craig Morton, Dave Krieg and Ken O'Brien (two each). Erickson is the only Buc to have done so. Vinny Testaverde came extremely close on September 13, 1992 when he completed 22 of 25 passes for 363 yards, two touchdowns and no interceptions against Green Bay, resulting in a 145.4 rating. He scored as high as possible in every category except touchdowns per pass attempt. Had Testaverde thrown one more touchdown pass, he would have had his perfect game.
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- Gina of Ocala, Florida asks:
What are the official names of the Bucs' colors? I heard red and pewter (which to me is silver) and then one website says red and "Puder" which I don't know what that "Puder" is. Thanks.
Answer Man: Well, I guess that "Puder" is a really poor attempt to spell pewter. That's awful.
The Buccaneers' official colors are Buccaneers Red, Pewter, Orange and Black. The first two are the primary colors and the last two are the complementary colors. You'll see accents of orange and black, such as on the outline of the jersey numbers, but basically we are Buccaneers Red and Pewter.
And I would strongly disagree that pewter = silver. Just do a little online searching about what color pewter is and you'll get a lot of different answers. And that's the point. It has an unusual appearance that often looks different in different settings. The Bucs helmet is a metallic pewter, and it almost appears as if it's a cross between silver and gold. The Bucs were looking for something distinctive when they developed their new colors and uniforms in 1997, and they certainly found it in pewter.
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- RD Shirley of St. Petersburg, Florida finishes this off with one that isn't really a question:
Not to beat the Buc nicknames into the ground, but the very first one that I can remember being hung on one of our guys was " Captain Crunch." Ol' number 33, Mark Cotney. He was the "John Lynch" for us back when the rest of the league used us as a punch line.
Answer Man: Excellent! Thank you, Shirley. I actually had not heard that one but I like it.
We've been discussing nicknames for players down through the years in my last few columns, and every now and then a reader sends another one into the mailbag. Please don't worry about beating the topic into the ground. I think it's interesting and I'll keep printing them as long as you keep sending them.
Mark Cotney was a safety, like the great John Lynch, who played for the Buccaneers from their inaugural season of 1976 through 1984, matching Head Coach John McKay's tenure. He played in 113 games with 92 starts and was a key member of that famous 1979 team that nearly took the Bucs to the Super Bowl.
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Okay, that will do it for today's penance. Again, I hope you'll forgive me for my mistake. At least I finally got the correct answer in print, right? I can't say for sure when I'll be back with another abbreviated column, but please keep the questions coming in the meantime.
