S.S. Mailbag Draft Season Heating Up

Over the course of the last week, I’ve been posting a series of articles looking at the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ entire history of drafting in the first through seventh rounds. Here’s a link to the most recent one concerning Round One picks; it contains links to all the others.

In the course of gathering information for those stories, I ended up looking at the games played and games started totals for a good number of players in Bucs history. And doing so prompted me to look up a little team trivia, which I’ll share with you here. I’m going to get too deep into it because, frankly, I’m not sure if it’s as interesting to everyone else as it was to me.

My question: Which player in Bucs history played in the most regular season games without ever making a single start?

Now a lot of you can probably think of a good place to start the guessing. Punters and kickers never officially start games, so if you keep one of them around for a long time he’s going to get a lot of games played without any starts. And, yes, 10 of the top players on the Bucs’ list of most games played without a start were punters or kickers. Ah, but we can’t forget about long-snappers, because they’re never on the field for the first offensive or defensive plays, which is how a “start” is earned. And sure enough, the answer to the question above comes from that group of players. Here are the top five:

1. LS Andrew Economos: 108. “Eco” was the Bucs’ long-snapper from 2006 through 2013, which is a really nice run for a player at that position. (He was very good at it.) He missed 13 games in 2006 and another seven in 2011 but still surpassed 100 games played.

2. K Michael Husted: 96. I’ll admit, I had guessed that Martin Gramatica would be the kicker with the most games as a Buccaneer, but it’s actually Husted, who held the job for six seasons from 1993-98. He never missed a game in that span, which is how he finished ahead of Gramatica.

3. K Martin Gramatica: 89. Gramatica also played six seasons in Tampa, but he missed two games in 2001 and was released after 11 games in 2006, which is how he falls behind Husted, if only by a little.

4t. P Josh Bidwell: 80. The only Bucs punter ever to make the Pro Bowl, Bidwell played in every game from 2004 through 2008.

4t. P Mark Royals: 80. Royals was the Bucs’ punter in 1990 and 1991 and then again from 1999-2001. That’s five seasons during which he played in every game.

Now, I’ll bet some of you are wondering, who is the non-specialist who has played the most…