Doug Williams belongs in the Pro Football Hall of Fame because of what he did with the Bucs (never mind what he did in Super Bowl 22).Yes, he was Super Bowl MVP, but that's not really a big deal. Nineteen other quarterbacks have won that award at least once. Yes, he threw four touchdowns in the Super Bowl, but four other quarterbacks have done that or better.What sets him apart from any other Hall of Fame quarterback is his 33-33-1 record with the Bucs. No one but Doug had the ability to keep the Bucs of Hugh Culverhouse from stinking up the football landscape (former Buc Steve Young, who is deservedly in the Hall of Fame, certainly couldn't do it). If you love the sport of football, you know that Culverhouse and his minions constituted the most grotesque enemy the game has ever known. During the 19 seasons that the Culverhouse regime corroded pro football in Tampa, the team played 225 games, if you don't count the ones Doug started. With a record of 54-171, those Buc teams were quantifiably horrible. And it was Bad Ball you could count on, year in and year out. If you don't count any of the Doug seasons, the Bucs lost a minimum of 10 games every single year that the Culverhouse folks were doing whatever it was that they were doing.Doug made a horrible organization (.240 winning percentage without him) look like an OK organization (.500 winning percentage with him). The front office for his team didn't have the Rooney family, Tex Schramm, Eddie DeBartolo, Bob Kraft or anyone along those lines. Instead, it had the cheap, ugly guy and his lackeys. Now, you might look at the stat sheet, and you might see that one of Doug's greatest contributions to Buc history (leading the 1979 team to the NFC Championship Game) looks sickly by the numbers. That season, Doug's completion rate was slightly below 42 percent, and he threw 18 touchdowns against 24 interceptions.If you those numbers trouble you, I have a question for you. Do the names Morris Owens, Isaac Hagins, and Larry Mucker mean anything to you? If you didn't follow the Bucs in the 1970s, there's almost no way that you know those three guys were the top three wide receivers Doug had in 1979. It's nice when Bill Walsh drafts Jerry Rice or Chuck Noll drafts Lynn Swann. But what if you're in Culverhouse's Creamsicle Hell, and they acquire Owens/Hagins/Mucker to catch your passes? If you can keep your head above water in that kind of environment, your bust should be in Canton.
