On the day the Tampa Bay Buccaneers announced Chris Simms as their new starting quarterback, the team's general manager, Bruce Allen, spent the morning watching practice before retiring to his office.
In his third decade as a pro football executive, Allen could not recall running a team that started 0-4, the mark from which only one NFL franchise in the last 14 years has recovered to grab a playoff spot.
"It doesn't feel good," Allen said Wednesday in a telephone interview. "I don't have a dog, so I can't kick it."
The Buccaneers are one of three 0-4 teams staring up at the sky from the bottom of a well.
A quarter of the season is gone and Tampa Bay, the San Francisco 49ers and the Miami Dolphins are in need of the kind of a miracle that does not come cheap.
In each of their respective divisions, at least one rival has an undefeated record (the Dolphins, with the Jets and the New England Patriots pounding opponents, have two).
The hometown Bucs fans, many of them with season-ticket packages, are getting antsy.
Don't even ask about the news media.
In 1992, when the San Diego Chargers started 0-4, including a 27-0 throttling in the fourth game to the Houston Oilers, the rookie coach Bobby Ross said he had stopped reading newspapers because the barbs were so sharp.
"I was getting hammered," Ross said Wednesday in an interview from West Point, where he now coaches Army football. "They got after us real bad."
In Week 5, though, a strange thing happened to Ross' Chargers. They defeated the Seattle Seahawks, 17-6, and drank in the feeling. Three more victories followed before a 16-14 loss to Kansas City sent the Chargers back to 4-5.
But then the Chargers reeled off eight straight victories, including a 17-0 payback of the Chiefs in a wild-card playoff game, before losing to the Dolphins, 31-0, in the divisional playoffs.
Two years later, the Chargers advanced to the Super Bowl.
Ross credits his team's rebound after an 0-4 start to his coaching staff and to the growth of quarterback Stan Humphries. But Ross also recalled doing little things himself, walking the halls of the Chargers facility with his chin up, displaying no sense of panic despite knowing that in the cold business of football he could have been fired at any second.
It is that advice that Ross said might benefit the coaches at Tampa Bay, San Francisco and Miami as they attempt to crawl out of their hole.
"Don't walk around like Eeyore," Ross said. "There is a tendency to back off, but I didn't do that. I tried to be fundamental with our team, sticking with what I believed in and how the system worked."
Most of the time, though, the turnarounds do not come, at least not in the same season. That is why Ross' 1992 team was so unusual.
On Wednesday, Ross wondered aloud if he should really be counseling his former NFL peers, considering the start of Army's season: losses to Louisville, Houston, Connecticut and Texas Christian, for an 0-4 record.
"I might need some help from them right now," Ross said.
Baltimore Ravens running back Jamal Lewis was suspended for two games without pay by the NFL for violating the league's substance-abuse policy, a day after pleading guilty to trying to set up a drug deal four years ago.
Lewis will not appeal the punishment and will miss those games in late October, the Ravens said. He plans to play on Sunday at Washington.
Lewis, 25, also was fined two weeks' salary, meaning he will lose a total of US$761,000.
"You have needlessly sullied your own reputation and reinforced unfair and negative public perceptions of NFL players generally," Tagliabue said. "The long-term damage to your own reputation may well be even greater."
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