FAB 4. It’s Lying Season For The Bucs And The NFL

I recently saw the new Motley Crue movie, The Dirt, on Netflix. It’s based on the book The Dirt, which is an autobiographical look back at the legendary rock band’s rise to popularity from the streets of the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles back in the 1980s.

Growing up as a metal head back in junior high and high school, I found the movie to be fun and very riveting (just don’t let your kids watch it because there is plenty of sex and drugs in the Netflix movie along with the Crue’s rock ‘n roll).

Netflix’s The Dirt

In the spirit of Motley Crue and The Dirt, he’s some real dirt about your Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

General manager Jason Licht is a liar, and so is head coach Bruce Arians.

In fact every general manager and head coach in the league is. It comes with the territory and is a part of doing business in the NFL, especially this time of year.

Scouts, general managers and coaches tell most of their lies between now and the NFL Draft. The joke around the league is that the time between the NFL Scouting Combine and the NFL Draft is officially known as “lying season” in the NFL.

Just because Licht and Arians aren’t being truthful right now about their intentions with defensive tackle Gerald McCoy – like the way they lied about the Bucs supposedly wanting to keep wide receiver DeSean Jackson when they were trying to trade him – doesn’t mean that they are bad, nefarious people. Lying to the media is necessary and strategic in the NFL, even though we in the media may not like it.

In football, lying is part of the game. Most of the time, GMs and coaches tell the media the truth. Yet other times they tell the media one thing and actually doing something else. I’ve been on the Bucs beat for 24 years and every coach and general manager I’ve covered has either purposefully lied to me or misled me before.

Sam Wyche lied and didn’t seem to have a problem with it.

Tony Dungy lied and struggled with it. Licht is the same way.

Rich McKay lied and was good at it because he’s a politician at heart.

Bruce Allen trumped McKay and could give a master class in lying.

Players had trust issues with Jon Gruden because lied to them by telling them what they wanted to hear rather than the truth.

Former Bucs head coach Greg Schiano and ex-GM Mark Dominik – Photo by: Cliff Welch/PR

Mark Dominik, Raheem Morris and Greg Schiano lied to cover up a lot of turmoil at One Buc Place that they helped create.

Lovie Smith lied out of ignorance.

Dirk Koetter lied out of necessity.

Arians is so brutally honest that some of his lies, like his desire to have Jackson remain with the Bucs, that they get lost in the subterfuge.

These lies can be about players’ injuries, players’ development behind the scenes, players’ futures with the team and what potential free agents and draft prospects the team might be targeting. Sometimes the truth can hurt too much to admit and cause damage if actually uttered in press conferences or to the media in interviews.

It wouldn’t do have done any good for Koetter to say that Caleb Benenoch absolutely sucked at right guard last year and that Alex Cappa wasn’t quite ready and wasn’t any better – even though that was the truth. Koetter knew it, Licht knew it and any Bucs fan with eyes knew it. But aside from the simple virtue of being truthful and transparent, what good would admitting the truth do in terms of Tampa Bay’s right guard situation?

Arians is more of a straight shooter, and that will be refreshing because he doesn’t give a damn about a player’s feelings. But even Arians had to lie about Jackson possibly remaining a Buccaneer in interviews at the Combine to salvage or maintain any of Jackson’s trade value for Licht.

Bucs GM Jason Licht and head coach Dirk Koetter – Photo by: Cliff Welch/PR

No one in the media likes getting lied to, and I try not to take it personally – understanding the necessary strategy behind the falsehoods I’m occasionally fed from NFL teams and agents, some of whom are the most notorious liars of them all. As a professional, it stings to report information that you get that turns out to be not true.

The most recent example was friend and colleague Rick Stroud of the Tampa Bay Times reporting that Gerald McCoy will remain a Buccaneer in 2019 – only to have Licht and Arians cast doubt on that report a few days later at the NFL Scouting Combine (and again at the NFL Annual Meeting). Stroud didn’t do anything wrong even though his story may turn out to be untrue. He reported what he believed to be valid information at the time from a very credible source.

Knowing what I know about the situation, I would have done the exact same thing if that info were fed to PewterReport.com instead of Stroud. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out where the story came from, and because the Bucs have bungled the whole McCoy saga this offseason the team would have been better off if Stroud had not written that story claiming McCoy would remain in Tampa Bay in 2019 at all.

Of course the overwhelmingly vast majority of Stroud’s stories are dead-on accurate, and that’s why he’s one of the very best Bucs beat writers in Tampa Bay. He’s broken more Bucs news than anyone in the market. Stroud also has a good B.S. meter and was quick to detach from the narrative he was fed prior to the Combine and realize that Arians and Licht were lying about their intentions with Jackson and McCoy – just like I did after sitting in on those interviews, too.

Sometimes when we’re wrong in the media about your Buccaneers it’s our fault. We as reporters read into a situation the wrong way or drew the wrong conclusion on occasion. Maybe we didn’t have enough information or the right information at the time.

Bucs head coach Bruce Arians – Photo by: Mark Cook/PR

But sometimes we wind up being wrong about a story because the information we got that appeared to be rock solid from a “trusted source” was actually telling a lie for strategic reasons. That usually happens around this time of year – now more than ever, as teams try to put out misinformation in an attempt to manipulate the draft and get some draft prospects to fall, or to hide a team’s true intentions about which players it likes, so as not to tip off other clubs.

The tradeoff for being an unwittingly accomplice in the media – at times we have no choice because the sources of information we have at our disposal usually provide good, truthful information outside of the occasional strategic lie and that makes those falsehoods hard to detect – is that we usually get the real truth that feeds our journalistic curiosity.

That’s the real dirt – the real inside scoop.

Unfortunately for you Buccaneers fans, I can only report about half of what I know because most conversations with team personnel are off the record and privileged information. But I have some stories about your favorite team that would absolutely blow your mind – stories involving some wild truths and some wild lies.

Those types of stories usually come out over time after regimes and players come and go, and maybe I’ll write a book about the real dirt about the Bucs one day – unless of course Stroud beats me to it.