The Bucs made a big mistake. No, I’m not talking about the KJ affair. No, I’m not referring to the decision to play it safe in the last three minutes against the Colts. And no, I’m not talking about any of the decisions regarding special teams this year (although maybe I should). Instead, I’m talking about a guy named McKay. You know, the guy that now works for Atlanta?

There are several reasons why the Bucs have been a pretty consistent performer on the field for the last six or seven years. They have had some good players, they have had some good coaches, and they have made good personnel decisions. They’ve kept payroll under control, and they’ve avoided some of the “sign-em now, pay for it later” salary cap disasters that have beset other teams. Now who do you suppose has been there making these decisions? I’ll give you a hint: his name is not Jon (although he did have a father named John). Now there’s talk that the current coach might like to have the GM he had with his former team; that they would make a good team again. Now ask yourself, which team in the league is currently most likely to implode from salary cap disaster? Look no further than coach’s former team.

Now try and tell me that McKay leaving for a division rival is a good thing.

Tomorrow marks an anniversary, one that most of you are familiar with by now… 100 years since the Wright brothers first flew. I was watching a documentary on the History Channel last night. In it, they claimed that it was six years before anyone other than the Wright brothers engaged in “heavier than air, self sustained flight”, following that historic day in 1903. Furthermore, when others did find similar success, even though it was six years or more later, they also claimed to be the first. Although the program did not elaborate, they seemed to imply that the event was not well publicized. How else could someone claim the same thing – six years later!

Two guys who made bicycles invented then flew an aircraft, and none of the wealth and resources of the rest of the world could do it for another six years? I found that, as much as anything else in the documentary, absolutely fascinating. Maybe it is because I take flight for granted. Just because it is routine now, doesn’t mean it was then. After all, it wasn’t like the Wright brothers could make a photo copy of their research and mail it in. They couldn’t fax it in. They couldn’t call someone on the phone and discuss it. They couldn’t email anyone either. By today’s standards, they were cut off from the rest of the world. It’s a wonder that anything got done at all back then.

So what would happen if a comparable achievement happened today? Surely it would get a weeks worth of coverage on all of the 24 hour news stations. We would be inundated with close-up shots of the inventors, their families, their birth place, and outside shots of the facility where the historic work was done. But more importantly, would it take six years to replicate the achievement? Are the circumstances of today more conducive to the free flow of information? It is a given that technology removes many of the barriers to communication, but are there more societal barriers? Are people more protective of their discoveries, particularly if they stand to make money from their discovery?

This is the point at which you may be expecting me rail against today’s self interested scientists that hinder the advancement of mankind. I could bring up the example of the private sector effort to map the human genome, and the flurry of (undeserved, overly vague, detrimental?) patents that came with it. The thing of it is, I’m not going to. I don’t think human nature has changed in one hundred years. The Wright brothers documentary stressed, over and over, the secretive nature of the Wright brother’s project. Even if they had a fax machine, the documentary seemed to suggest that the Wright brothers would not have been stumbling over themselves to share the plans of their aircraft with other researchers. Was this the real reason no one else flew like the Wright brothers for six more years? Was it the lack of information technology, the secretive nature of their project, or a combination of the two?

Folks are always telling me about the good old days; the days when people behaved better, when all the world got together after church on Sundays and sang Kumbaya.

Yeah, sure.