Five more touchdowns in 16 games.

Five more touchdowns instead of field goal attempts or turnovers and the Bucs would have improved from 24th in the NFL in red zone efficiency into the Top 10. And maybe end up sniffing the playoffs instead of a 5-11 disappointment of a season.

Offensive coordinator Todd Monken spoke to the media at One Buc Place on Thursday and said, for the Bucs offense to get to where they want to go, the red zone offense must be better,.

“Well I got a chance to meet with the team, and I don’t sugarcoat things very much and we absolutely chose to suck,” Monken said. “We made that decision as an offense to play poorly, we did.

Monken went onto talk about some of the things the team did to shoot themselves in the foot last season.

Bucs TE O.J. Howard – Photo by: Cliff Welch/PR

“We did enough things that you can’t do. You do if you are a bad team. Bad football loses before good football wins. We are talking about quarterback-center exchanges, costly penalties, missed opportunities to put games away. But I do like the way our team finished in the end.

“How do we stop turning the ball over, how do we say being explosive and how do we score touchdowns in the red zone? We finished 24th in the league(red zone TD efficiency) and what is interesting about that is it just would have taken five more touchdowns and you jump from 24th to 8th because the sample size is so small. You had like 53 opportunities which was seventh in the league. We got down there seventh most in the league, but we didn’t take advantage of those opportunities.

“We chose suck. We chose to not do it as well as we can do it. That is the way it is.”