SmashMouth

He looks as if he could've been one of them at some point, with his beefy arms and gap-toothed smile. There was a time, years ago, when Greg Schiano could have sold a whole room with his conviction. He'd sit on strangers' couches, in Oakland, N.J., or Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and make promises. Give me your boy, he'd say, and I'll bring him back a man. Trust me, he'd say. And they would.

But then there were no boys left, only men. Schiano, former hero at Rutgers University, started his second season with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in a meeting room in late July. He gathered dozens of men together, millionaires with Range Rovers, grunts who'd be gone within weeks. He showed a video clip of the Super Bowl, told the Bucs they were good enough to be there, and passed around a sheet of paper with a connect-the-dots puzzle. The connected dots revealed a picture of the Lombardi trophy.

The goals were by no means a stretch. The Bucs had eight Pro Bowlers, and newly acquired defensive stars Darrelle Revis and Dashon Goldson. They'd make it if they stayed together and followed Schiano's theme of Trust, Belief and Accountability -- TBA, as he liked to call it. Trust the system, believe in him, be accountable for yourself.

Schiano didn't know that in three months, his team would be 0-7 and he'd be fighting for his job. He didn't know that by the first week of training camp, he'd already lost them.

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