Bucs Close Deal With Super Bowl Win
The Tampa Bay Buccaneers have perfected the art of the deal.
First, they gave up four draft picks and $8 million to lure coach Jon Gruden away from the Oakland Raiders. Then, Gruden guided the Bucs to their first NFL title Sunday with a 48-21 Super Bowl victory over his old team.
"We were waiting for the right man, and the right man came — Jon Gruden," said Bucs owner Malcom Glazer, the man who engineered the trade 11 months ago.
As expected, Gruden knew the Raiders inside and out from his four years as their coach, and Tampa Bay's performance on the field reflected that.
The Bucs scored a Super Bowl-record three touchdowns on defense. The final two, on interception returns by Derrick Brooks and Dwight Smith, halted a valiant Oakland rally and put the exclamation point on Tampa Bay's title.
As CBS News correspondent Steve Futterman reports, the game was so one sided that at times the Tampa Bay players said they were bored.
"We wanted to dominate this ballgame from start to finish," Buccaneers' defensive tackle Warren Sapp said. "We let it get a little loose at times, but it wasn't nothing we couldn't shut off and get this thing under control and finish them off."
"This is a great defensive team," Gruden said. "Against the forward pass, they say, `Bring it on."'
Gruden's sudden departure from Oakland and its renegade owner, Al Davis, was the plot line that dominated a riveting championship week. The game was almost as intriguing.
The Raiders scored three straight touchdowns to cut a 31-point deficit to 34-21 midway through the fourth quarter. But then the Bucs put their signature on this game with the two interception returns.
Tampa decisively won the meeting between its league-leading defense and Oakland's top-ranked offense. Not only did the defense score three touchdowns, it held the Raiders to a meager 154 yards through the first three quarters.
Davis, the anti-establishment, 73-year-old patriarch of the Raiders, wore black while he sat stoically in the press box and watched his team's first trip to the Super Bowl in 19 seasons disintegrate.
He never got to utter his immortal mantra, "Just win, baby."
Instead, it was Gruden's turn to gloat.
He's the driven taskmaster with the wicked grin, known as "Coach Chucky" for his quirky resemblance to the horror movie doll.
He replaced Tony Dungy, who was fired after last season, taking over the team he grew up adoring when his dad coached for the Bucs.
"I knew it was going to be a very sensitive situation," Gruden said. "Tony Dungy did a great job. I reaped the benefits of it. But by God, this is Tampa Bay's night."
The Raiders played without All-Pro starting center Barret Robbins, who was sent home before the game for missing team functions on Saturday.
It was an awkward, ill-timed turn of events, but it was hardly the difference.
Gruden and the Bucs were just too good.
"You can't say anything until you win, but now we've won it and I can say we're a great defense," said safety Dexter Jackson, selected the Most Valuable Player for making two interceptions.
A crowd of 67,603 packed Qualcomm Stadium, the third time the venue hosted the Super Bowl.
Security, such a big issue for last year's game in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, wasn't as big a focus among the public. But the NFL and the city of San Diego still took it seriously.
Ticketholders waited 30 minutes or more in line to go through metal detectors. When they entered, their every move was on camera, thanks to a state-of-the-art system that allows security personnel views of every corner of the stadium in real time.
San Diego police made six arrests for minor offenses at the stadium and at least a dozen more in the city's Gaslamp neighborhood, but said fans were generally well-behaved.
In Oakland after the game, police in riot gear responded with rubber bullets and tear gas when rowdy crowds set at least two cars on fire, threw rocks and bottles at passing vehicles and broke windows at a McDonald's restaurant. Three firefighters were treated for minor injuries after revelers threw bottles and rocks at them, Battalion Chief James Williams said.
More than two dozen people were arrested, mostly for public drunkenness, authorities said.
More than 100 million Americans watched the game on TV, and saw the ads that are as much a part of the game as the action on the field.
The award for best timing went to a Budweiser commercial that showed two cowboys mocking a zebra looking into an instant-replay monitor, the kind the NFL's zebra stripe-clad officials use to make decisions on disputed plays.
When ABC returned to the game, there it was — a shot of referee Bill Carollo peering inside the box for the first instant-replay decision of the game.