Still Not Getting It…

There are two types of owners in this league. There are owners who are committed to winning and owners that are committed to profiting. It shouldn’t take long for you to figure this one out. Both types are interested in the bottom line, but the former realizes the best way to make money is to win.

An owner like Jerry Jones, Dan Snyder or (more recently) Stephen Ross may make knee-jerk decisions, overpay for a player or two and possibly even fire a coach prematurely. But they’re going to fork over the money to try and win. It’s about winning.

Then you have other kinds of owners who fire an expensive coach and rather than try to go out and get another top flight candidate, they save a bit by promoting a 32 year old coordinator because he’ll come a bit a cheaper (and then spin it so it sounds like there was deeper thought put into it than that). Lets just be honest here, Raheem Morris was an impressive candidate, but a big part of his hiring was that Glazers didn’t want to have to pay a lot of money to two coaches. They’re on the hook for Jon Gruden until 2011.

Last week the Glazers picked up the option on Raheem Morris. They didn’t give him an extension with a nice pay boost and some real job security, nope, they just picked up his option. This is indicative of the way this ownership has been stewarding the Bucs recently. News that the Bucs chose to just pick up options on its head coach and GM, Mark Dominik, wasn’t surprising. But this isn’t the right move.

The Glazers need to look at the fact that they got lucky. This doesn’t happen in the NFL, it’s the exception not the rule. A lot of times when teams go the cheap route, and rather than just pay for the top candidates opt to find a low-cost option, it blows up in their face. The Glazers weren’t trying to go out and land a prize when they replaced Jon Gruden and Bruce Allen a couple years ago, they were looking to avoid having to pay two salaries to each position. They wanted a deal.

What they got were two incredibly hungry young guys that made the best of their opportunity. Mark Dominik and Raheem Morris have, for all intensive purposes, been great for the Bucs. I’m sure that their success will be spun like the Glazers did their research and picked the right guys for the job, which is doctoring the truth quite a bit. But, fortunately for Bucs fans, Morris and Dominik have been superb. They’ve infused the team with a lot of talented young players and put them firmly into contention for the foreseeable future. That’s impressive, people have noticed.

So by not giving them the extensions (and pay raises) that they’ve earned, the Glazers are not exactly engendering good will from either Morris or Dominik. Add the fact that, as we’ve discussed several times on this site, the coaching staff is currently not retained and are mostly open to be pilfered by colleges and other pro teams, and, well, the Glazers need to get with the program.

In two years for Raheem Morris and next year for Mark Dominik, when other teams come calling (as they undoubtedly will given the direction of things in Tampa) why the hell would either of them be loyal to the Glazers?

I mean yeah they got the chance to cut their teeth here, but they both know part of why they got their shots was that they came on the cheap. Add the lack of support from the owners and it’s tough to see why either of them would feel any overwhelming sense of loyalty to the Glazers.

This was another blown move by the ownership. It’s a shame too, there is greatness brewing the in the Bay area, but it could all be spoiled by shoddy ownership. Here’s hoping things start to look up.