Faltering Bucs’ collapse obscures season of progress Martin Fennelly, The Tampa Tribune, published 28 December 2015 Remember when they were 6-6 and Feel Good filled the air? The Bucs had their quarterback. The future seemed set in cement. Only three Feel Bad weeks of football have turned it into a sarcophagus — and assured a fifth straight losing season. The Bucs lost to the Bears on Sunday, 26-21. It wasn’t that close. Lovie Smith’s faltering squad couldn’t even get to the Carolina game to see how hard the now 14-1 Panthers will play, possibly opening the door for an 8-8 Bucs finish. The Bucs slammed it shut Sunday. Since Smith’s team hit 5-5, they’re 1-4. Since reaching 6-6, they’re 0-3. Simple as that. “We’re going to talk about this one right now,” Smith said. “We’re not going to talk about our wins we had before. We’re just going to talk about this loss. That’s disappointing, because we’re a lot better football team than that. Let’s not group it all together. This is a better football team. Today, we did not play our best ball. Let’s keep them separate.” Why? Me, I’m a group-it-together fiend. Which reminds me: Lovie is now 8-23 as Bucs head coach. This is no way to end this season. It obscures progress (going from 2-14 to 6-9 with a quarterback for the future is just that). This three-game stink bog reminds us how far this club has to go, how it keeps killing itself with turnovers (three more Sunday, two from Doug Martin, one from Jameis Winston) and penalties (one, a final parting gift from Alterraun Verner, erased a William Gholston interception). It asks the question all over again: Is Lovie really the guy to put this franchise over the top? I’m not feeling it at the moment. Sunday, Smith said, “We’re a lot better football team than that.” I’m not feeling that, either. Bucs fans have to keep telling themselves, over and over, “We’ve got our quarterback.” They’re way ahead of us. They might believe in Jameis more than they believe in Lovie. The bottom line is that the Bucs have lost, in successive weeks, to New Orleans, St. Louis and Chicago. The Saints and Bears showed up in Tampa with nothing to play for, but still outplayed the Bucs. On the Winston front, No. 3 scrambled and threw a long touchdown pass to Charles Sims. Nice. He later threw a interception while trying to throw another touchdown to Sims, a panicky throw while under pressure. Horrible. After Winston completed a pass to Cameron Brate, he appeared to take a helmet-to-helmet hit from Chicago’s Pernell McPhee that left him shaken. “I looked back at the ref,” Winston said. “I don’t know how many times you’re going to get hit to the head and I’m not going to get a call. That’s how it is. People playing hard, playing fast, I’ve just got to lock in and can’t turn it over in the end zone. That’s it. It’s all on me.” Also: Winston, fresh from his childish behavior in St. Louis, got into it with Chicago safety Harold Jones-Quartey after the play on which Martin fumbled for the second time. Jones-Quartey had been a Bucs tormentor all afternoon, forcing Martin’s first fumble and later picking off Winston. Jameis looked upset Sunday. “I was,” he said. “I get upset a lot.” Reel that fury in, young man. The last three games have been a disaster. Energy and momentum have been sucked out of this season. Yes, there’s always the finale at Carolina. Winston talked about the one-loss Panthers. “One loss? I guarantee you they’re not worried about that,” he said. “They’re going to try to take our heads off like they’ve been playing well all year. So we’ve got to compete. That’s the mentality that we have to change here. We want people to be talking about, ‘Oh, did you know Tampa Bay lost today?’ ” He wants that to become highly unusual, to constitute news. No news Sunday. Just another loss near the end of another Bucs losing season. At the moment, they’re hard to separate.