This site is dedicated to keeping track of various statistical information about the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and their opponents, for no good reason other than it entertains me. On the front page, I keep a blog of various Bucs news and other news around the NFL that I think is interesting. The links above (like the one you clicked to get here) lead to various information about this site itself. The links to the side (the cute little footballs that glow) are the links to the stats. Take a look around.
I am constantly adding to this site, and stats should be current through the latest game the Bucs played. I definitely take requests for various stats that can't be easily found through the pages provided. Contact me and let me know what you want to see! Also, feel free to liberally use the blog comment fields for whatever Bucs discussions you please. Thanks!
All written content on this site is Copyright ©2008 under this Creative Commons License. Team logos are the property of their respective teams and have been used without permission of any kind. I don't think anyone actually owns the statistical information contained herein, so there you go.
This site requires a modern browser with Javascript enabled. After much testing and tweaking, it seems to look and function best in Firefox, but should be fine in Safari or Internet Explorer (won't bother linking to it).
I used Bare Bones Software's BBEdit 8.0 to create this site on my Powermac G5 (dual 2.0 Ghz). On the occasions when I had to use a PC to code, I used Notepad and swore a lot. All pages are written in PHP 4.3.x. The database used to contain all the statistical data is MySQL 4.0.24, which has behaved wonderfully despite not supporting subqueries until I already figured out how to get by without them (grrrrr). Database administration was made dramatically easier by using phpMyAdmin 2.6.1-pl3.
The blog portion of this site uses Six Apart's Movable Type with GREAT assistance from the MTIncludePlus plug-in.
Pictures of the various football helmets were provided by The Helmet Project and used with implicit permission as a “non-commercial” use.
Bucstats.com employs a linking convention where links within this site are not underlined until you hover over them (like a profile on Mike Alstott, for example) and links outside this site are underlined with dashes all the time (here is a link to buccaneers.com.)
This site is not affiliated in any way with the National Football League, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers or any other NFL team.
The bulk of the data for this site came from the Buccaneers media guides, 1976 - present. If you know anything about those media guides, you know that the statistics aren't remarkably thorough or accurate, especially in the early years. To provide missing data and verify what I already had, I scoured and pillaged the Buc Power web site. Buc Power is absolutely, positively the most complete archive of Buccaneers information ever in the history of the universe. Paul Stewart, administrator of Buc Power and president of the Bucs UK fan club, was thoughtful enough to allow me to take whatever I needed to make this site as accurate and complete as possible. Various other statistics came from the Buccaneers web site and the NFL web site.
If you look hard enough, you will notice a few inconsistencies in the stats. There are examples where the numbers just don't add up to what they should. The explanation for most of these occurances is simply that the numbers don't add up from the sources. Even in the cases of official Bucs and NFL publications, 1 + 1 does not always equal 2. I have never heard an adequate explanation as to why. That said, those cases are still relatively small compared to the overall size of this database.
None of this is to say that there aren't just some errors or typos in here that are completely my fault. In fact, I found one just a few minutes ago. Read the next paragraph for how to contact me if you catch one of my mistakes.
Contributions to the content of this site are always welcome. If you see something that is incorrect or missing and can prove what it should be (there's the catch), let me know and I'll give you credit for the data or the correction. If you are a former Bucs player, I'd love the chance to ask you a couple questions about your time with the team and what you're doing now. Drop me a line and we'll work it out.
The author (who just loves writing about himself in the third-person) grew up in Clearwater and has been a Bucs fan since the age of seven. He is also a student of mathematics (with a degree to prove it!), finds football statistics interesting and is somewhat proficient in PHP, so this site was bound to happen eventually. Surprisingly, he has never painted his face orange or red and has only been to a handful of actual Bucs games. He finds DirecTV's NFL Sunday Ticket much more comfortable and convenient. Especially since he lives in Atlanta now. If he wasn't a Bucs fan, his favorite team would be the Titans and, having been a student at the University of Tennessee, he would think Peyton Manning is the greatest. The author is currently considering the feasibility of a UT site like this one.