Your Team's Worst Defeat

[Throwin_Samoan]

The Bucs' biggest defeats were 62-28 to the Jets in '85 and 42-0 to the Steelers in '76, but the one that sticks is the choke job in St. Louis in 1987.

Tampa Bay had Ray Perkins, who came in highly touted and was counted on to turn things around after the disastrous Leeman Bennett regime and they were 4-3 after beating the Packers on the road. Given they had been horrible since making the playoffs in the truncated 1982 season, hopes were high.

And they had a 28-3 lead in the fourth quarter before the Cardinals (who would move to Arizona after the season) came back to win 31-28. Donald Igwebuike missed a 53-yard field goal attempt at the gun that would have sent it to overtime.

They never recovered. Not that season (they lost the next seven games to finish 4-11) nor any season until 1997.

There have been a lot of losses since 1976 (this season was only the 13th winning campaign in 41 seasons), but that one kind of epitomizes what the franchise has been about since inception, more so than the 1999 NFC Championship Game loss (or even the 1979 NFC title game, which I sat in the end zone for, and which could have been won with even a middling performance by Doug Williams).