This is a thought that's been nagging at me ever since Week 2, when it became unshakably clear the Bucs were going to have one of the lousiest seasons in team history.  It wasn't a sudden realization, but it dawned on me that for all the fan talk about this being a 'rebuilding' year (even though the organization was clearly trying to avoid that word), it really had been a long time since the Bucs went through a rebuilding process...

To note: there is a difference between 'Rebuilding' and 'Having a Crappy Year.'  A Crappy Year is when your team has an established coach, solid veterans, a decent but possibly questionable rookie draft... and the season just goes awry with career and life-threatening injuries, bad luck, and lousy timing.  To wit, 2004 and 2006 were Crappy Years for the Bucs, especially when Chris Simms lost his spleen (!) and derailed his development into a starting QB (he wasn't great but was getting better... kinda... before the injury nearly killed him!)  By comparison, you could view 2007 as a Rebuilding year when you look at the facts that the team overhauled the defense with a slew of rookies (half of whom exceeded expectations) and the offense with a vet QB (Garcia) that steadied the team into the postseason.  It didn't feel like a Rebuilding year because we had a veteran coach (Gruden) and marquee team leaders (BROOKS) to make it seem like a smooth transition from the Super Bowl era roster to the new lineup.

But an Honest to God Rebuilding Year is when the entire slate is getting wiped clean.  Usually when a new coach gets introduced, replacing the older regime that had calcified or failed to maintain leadership and winning ways.  The new coach comes in with new plans, new schemes, new players to fit said schemes, and so on.  Pretty much what we've gotten out of the Bucs for the 2009 season.

When was the last time the Bucs truly wiped the slate clean like that?  It wasn't 2002, when Dungy left and Gruden entered the scene.  The only thing that truly changed then was the coach: the team that Dungy and his era built remained mostly intact.  The only massive change was at the RB position: changing from Dunn to Pittman.  Gruden brought with him a more effective offensive scheme and that was it... and he *did* acknowledge after the Super Bowl the debt he owed Dungy for building the team he led to victory in San Diego.

No, I put it to you that the last real time the Bucs had a Rebuilding Year was 1996: Dungy's first year.  And that *was* a debacle of epic proportions.  But only for the first 3 months or so.  By the end of the season the Bucs actually won a few games and fans could see the foundations of a winning defense being formed.  Next year 1997 was the Breakout year that ended the Bucs' long history of losing seasons, and Dungy's near-perfect record of making the postseason for his career as both a Buc and a Colt HC.

Just think: after 1996 the Bucs hadn't really had a team that was wall-bangingly, soul-shreddingly, historic-breathtakingly bad.  From 1983 to 1996, thirteen years of hideousness that made it hard for people to watch games through paper bags eye slots.  Then from 1997 to 2008, teams that either made the playoffs or had talent but bad luck, and never teams that at beginning of each season made you think "Oh GOD help us."  Eleven years of teams that made you think playoffs and Super Bowl appearances were good bets.

In some respects we fans had gotten spoiled.  We didn't go through this back when Gruden came on board.  Gruden had Brad Johnson and Keyshawn and Alstott, he had Sapp and Brooks and Lynch and Barber and Rice, he had Gramatica before he lost his groove, he had Tupa as Punter... okay that wasn't that good, but still he won with that existing lineup.  Gruden didn't really twist the team into his own until 2004 which was a bad year, but the fans could forgive it due to the lack of top draft picks that hindered the team's ability to obtain/develop talent but in return got us a coach that won us the Super Bowl.

I can't blame us for getting spoiled: living through team years like 1976-78 and then 1983-96 would make a lot of people forget those years actually happened.  And a lot of that was due to the Building and Rebuilding process those years endured, especially the cycle of disasters that were Bennett, Perkins, and Parcells, oops I mean Williamson.  Wyche also went through the Rebuilding cycle, but honestly if he had a more spendthrift owner willing to pay FAs and retain good players earlier on, well then we wouldn't have been under Culverhouse's ownership to begin with.  And the teams during the mid-late 80s would have been better, meaning fewer coaching changes anyways.  But I digress.

Here's my point: We fans need to remember that rebuilding a team takes time, energy, and sh-tloads of patience on the part of the owners, fans, and players alike.  It doesn't take one year, it may take two, it better be by Year Three that the team is making playoff appearances and making highlight reels on an hourly basis.  Is Morris out of his depth?  Possibly so.  This is his first year PERIOD in terms of major responsbility.  It may have been reckless on the part of the owners to jump on promoting him up from Defensive Coordinator to HC within days, but you can't entirely blame Morris for accepting the job (would YOU turn down a Head Coach position?).  The only true arguments we need to make about his attempts to rebuild should be on his shifting defensive and offensive schemes without truly considering the talent he had that could fit... which is why the defense seems so helpless and the the offense just barely clicking with a pretty-much rookie QB now at the helm.

The best thing to say in Morris' defense is that this is much a learning experience for him as anything as it ought to be for ANYONE who's a Head Coach for the first time ever: he's trying to find what works, and that's a basic element of Rebuilding a team.  Rare is a first-ever Head Coach who starts with a winning team: it's usually because he's taking over a half-decent team that merely needed a new vision, and is someone who merely tinkered with a unit/system without having to start completely from scratch.  Has Morris made mistakes?  Yes.  Is he learning from the mistakes?  For the most part: Yes, I think he is.  Is the team going to stay bad?  Probably: as noted, this is an honest-to-God Rebuilding Year, and there are clearly spots of poor talent and lack of depth at enough spots that can't be fixed right now, only by - one hopes - next year's FA and rookie draft markets.

So for everyone starting up "Fire Morris" websites: LIGHTEN THE F-CK UP.  Wait until next year to start complaining.

Okay?