Release of Derrick Ward is latest example of Tampa Bay Buccaneers' bad 2009 offseason

The failure of a football player is an easy thing to discuss.

Players will let you down, all right. There is nothing new in it, and nothing rare. It is merely a public acknowledgement that an athlete has been worth 10 cents on the dollar, and soon after he walks away, the world will forget all about him.

The failure of a football franchise is a bit more complicated.

Yeah, teams will let you down, too. For those who want to believe in their team, that's a harder disappointment. After all, the guys who made the decision about the failed player are busy making others, and nothing makes the customers worry about tomorrow more than yesterday's mistake.

And so, Disappointing Derrick Ward is gone from the Bucs, already and finally.

And who is to blame?

The player?

The team?

Or perhaps both?

They have failed together, the Bucs and their bust of a back. After 14 games of wondering where the Wind went, after watching him average 3.6 yards per carry and 29.2 yards per game, after witnessing a 409-yard season that had 616 fewer yards than the season before the Bucs gave him a contract, Ward is gone.

Around town, I suspect, the common response to his departure is, "What took the Bucs so long?''

Let's be honest. Not a lot of people out there will argue Ward's case. He was overweight, he was ineffective, and he always seemed unhappy. Even after a preseason game in Miami this year, he grumbled about the mud, and his coaches grumbled about him. Yeah, he was a bad fit from the start.

How bad was this signing? Think of it like this: From now on, Ward will be remembered as the Todd Steussie of running backs.

Here's a question: How on earth does a running back suffer a season as disappointing as 2009 was for Ward and then come into camp the next year overweight? Doesn't that say something about Ward's hunger? Doesn't that say something about him?

So, yeah, Ward helped color his pink slip. He was not good enough. He was not special enough. Money changes some players, and it's easy to wonder if Ward was one of those. His running style resembled that of a teenager who has come in late and is determined not to wake up his parents.

Put it this way: When a player is being paid $3.25 million a season on a team that was one of the worst running teams in the NFL, he had better be better than Ward was. For goodness' sake, Ward wasn't better than Carlos Brown, let alone Kareem Huggins, let alone Cadillac Williams. I'm not sure Ward was better than Lars Tate, and Lars, who last played in 1990, is getting up in years.

That said, the Bucs are a partner in this mistake, too. If Ward was a flop, well, he was their hand-picked flop.

If you're honest, you probably liked the Ward signing at the time. You looked at his thousand yards, and at his 5.5 yards per carry, and you thought he made sense. But the Bucs never found a way to get any of that ability out of him. They changed coordinators. They changed their scheme. As a staff, the coaches managed to coax out of Ward less than half the production he had the previous season.

More and more, it looks like the worst season the Bucs have had in 20 years was last year's offseason. They hired two coordinators, and neither made it through the season. They signed two veteran quarterbacks in Luke McCown and Byron Leftwich, spent most of the preseason deciding between them, and neither played beyond the third week of the regular season. They gave big contracts to Michael Clayton and Ward and kicker Mike Nugent, and all of them underachieved. It was a year spent strolling down Bad Idea Boulevard. As bad as it was, the 3-13 record was the fun part.

(If you wish, you can also add the one-game suspension of Aqib Talib that was announced Tuesday to 2009, too. One assumes the suspension would have at least come in the same calendar year of his offense if only commissioner Roger Goodell had remembered the Bucs were technically still in the NFL.)

Like most teams, the Bucs, I'm sure, would like it very much if you would dismiss all this as last year's news and proceed to talk about what a steal receiver Mike Williams was in this year's draft. Of course, it doesn't work that way. With losing teams, mistakes always stick on the bottom of their shoes. It is only winning that makes anyone forget.

For the Bucs, there is always 2010 to change impressions. Unless the UFL is hiring, Ward doesn't get that chance. All he gets is a ticket out of town.

At 3.6 yards per run, perhaps he should leave early for the airport.