Steve Young’s Two Years with the Buccaneers: What Really Happened
Steve Young went 3-16 as a starter with Tampa Bay. Threw 11 touchdowns, 21 interceptions, completed fewer than 55 percent of his passes. The Buccaneers decided he was a bust, used their first overall pick in 1987 on Vinny Testaverde, and traded Young to San Francisco for a second and a fourth. Bill Walsh took one look at the same quarterback and saw a future Hall of Famer. Both evaluations came from watching the same player. Only one of them was right.
A Winding Road to Tampa: The Supplemental Draft Nobody Remembers
Young didn’t arrive in Tampa Bay through the normal draft. Most people don’t know the mechanics of how he got there, and the path is genuinely strange. Coming out of BYU in 1983, Young completed 71.3 percent of his passes – an NCAA single-season record at the time – and finished second in Heisman voting behind Nebraska’s Mike Rozier. He was one of the best quarterback prospects the college game had produced in years. He did not go to the NFL. He signed with the Los Angeles Express of the USFL for a 10-year, $40 million contract, the richest in American sports at the time. A significant portion was structured as a deferred annuity; Young was reportedly still receiving payments from it into 2027.
The NFL, hedging against a potential USFL collapse, held a supplemental draft in June 1984 for players who had already signed with the USFL or CFL. The Cincinnati Bengals had the first pick. They had just taken Boomer Esiason in the regular draft and traded the supplemental pick to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Tampa used it on Young. This matters because Young had zero say in which NFL team would eventually own his rights. When the USFL started coming apart and Young bought out his contract for roughly $1.2 million in 1985, the Buccaneers were waiting.
He signed with Tampa Bay on September 10, 1985 – two days into that NFL season – for six years and $5 million with a $1 million signing bonus. The Express had been a mess operationally. The Buccaneers were worse. Young walked from one unstable situation directly into another, except this one had no escape hatch.
The Numbers from Tampa Bay, Read Honestly
Young’s two seasons with the Buccaneers broke down like this. In 1985, he took over from veteran Steve DeBerg after the team started 1-10. In 11 starts, he completed 52.2 percent of his passes for 935 yards, three touchdowns, and eight interceptions. He also rushed 40 times for 233 yards and a touchdown, a 5.8 average that showed exactly the mobility that would define his career. His best passing game in Tampa Bay was 277 yards in a loss to Green Bay.
In 1986, DeBerg started again to open the season, threw nine interceptions in the first two games, and Young got the job back. The team went 2-14 again. Young threw eight touchdowns and 13 interceptions on the year, completing 53.3 percent of his passes. The franchise’s record with Young as starter across both seasons: three wins, 16 losses.
Those numbers look bad. They were bad. What they don’t tell you is that the Buccaneers in 1985 and 1986 were in the middle of 12 consecutive seasons with at least 10 losses. The offensive line was not protecting anyone. The receiving corps had running back James Wilder as its most reliable target – Wilder was a fine player, but asking a halfback to be your primary passing weapon is a signal of how thin the roster was. Young was not managing a difficult situation. He was surviving one.
Why He Couldn’t Win There – and Why That Wasn’t Really About Him
Bill Walsh said it plainly after the trade: Young’s numbers in Tampa Bay were a product of the talent around him, not a reflection of his ability. Walsh had seen enough football to read past a stat line, and what he saw in Young was a quarterback who was throwing into coverage every week with no protection and no credible threats in the passing game.
The first season Young backed up Joe Montana in San Francisco – 1987, minimal playing time – he threw 10 touchdowns and zero interceptions. Passer rating of 120.8. Had he thrown enough passes to qualify, that mark would have led the league. The same player who went 3-16 in Tampa Bay posted a 120.8 rating the moment he had competent teammates and a competent scheme around him. That’s not development. That’s context.
There’s something worth sitting with here. Young was running for his life in Tampa Bay almost literally – his rushing numbers in 1985 were partly by design, but partly because the pocket collapsed so fast that scrambling was often the only option. He finished his career having rushed for 4,239 yards and 43 touchdowns, second-most by a quarterback in pro football history at the time of his retirement. The Buccaneers saw that scrambling and read it as a quarterback who couldn’t go through his progressions. Walsh saw it and understood he’d found the most athletic quarterback in the league.
One thing genuinely doesn’t add up: owner Hugh Culverhouse told Young three months before the trade that he was “his quarterback for life,” that Young was the player he wanted to build around. Then he traded him. Young shared this on the Rich Eisen Show years later, without apparent bitterness. The front office decision and the ownership statement were never reconciled publicly, and that gap says something about how fractured the Buccaneers organization was at the time – not just as a football team, but as a functioning operation.
The Trade Itself, and How Close Young Came to Going Somewhere Worse
On April 24, 1987, Tampa Bay traded Young to San Francisco for second and fourth-round picks. The Buccaneers used those picks on linebacker Winston Moss from Miami and wide receiver Bruce Hill from Arizona State. Moss started for four years and was a solid player. Hill caught 58 passes for 1,040 yards in 1988, his best season, and was out of football within five years. Neither made a Pro Bowl.
Young revealed on the Rich Eisen Show that he almost went to the St. Louis Cardinals instead. Tampa Bay had discussions with St. Louis before San Francisco entered the picture. The Cardinals in 1987 went 7-8. Decent by Buccaneers standards. But they were not the 49ers, did not have Bill Walsh, and did not have a roster that would have let Young do what he eventually did. A trade to St. Louis likely means Young spends three or four years as a starter on an average team, never wins a Super Bowl, and his Hall of Fame case becomes a genuinely difficult argument rather than a formality.
Walsh made the move for a specific reason: Joe Montana was 31 and going into his ninth season. Walsh wanted continuity at quarterback and saw Young as the answer. What he didn’t plan for – or maybe did – was that Montana would win two more Super Bowls with the 49ers after the trade, leaving Young to back up a legend for four full seasons before finally getting his chance. Young’s first year as the full-time starter came in 1991, four years after arriving in San Francisco.
What Tampa Bay Got Instead, and How That Worked Out
The Buccaneers used the first overall pick in the 1987 draft on Vinny Testaverde, the Heisman Trophy winner out of Miami. Testaverde went on to play 21 seasons in the NFL, which is an achievement. But his tenure in Tampa Bay was rough: six seasons, 77 touchdowns, and 112 interceptions. He led the league in interceptions twice. The Buccaneers didn’t have a winning record until 1997, a full decade after trading Young away.
Testaverde eventually found his footing elsewhere – he had real moments in Cleveland, Baltimore, and New York – and finished his career with 275 touchdowns. He had a legitimate NFL career. But in Tampa Bay, the franchise that traded away a future Hall of Famer to draft him, he never got them to the playoffs. They had to wait for Tony Dungy, then Jon Gruden, then Brad Johnson, to finally win a Super Bowl in January 2003.
It’s hard to say Tampa Bay was crazy to draft Testaverde. He was an elite prospect. The real mistake was not seeing clearly what they had in Young – and that mistake wasn’t about Testaverde at all. It was about what the Buccaneers organization was capable of evaluating. Walsh saw a broken context. Tampa Bay saw a broken quarterback. One of those readings required seeing past the immediate record, and the Buccaneers weren’t built to do that in 1987.
Young’s Career After Tampa Bay Put His Buccaneers Years in Permanent Context
Six NFL passing titles. Two league MVPs, in 1992 and 1994. A Super Bowl ring from Super Bowl XXIX, where he threw six touchdown passes and rushed for 49 yards in a 49-26 win over San Diego – the six TDs set a Super Bowl record that stood for years. A career passer rating of 96.8, which ranked as the highest in NFL history at the time of his retirement. Inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2005, the first left-handed quarterback to receive that honor.
Young enrolled in BYU’s law school while still playing and graduated with his Juris Doctorate in 1994, during the same season he set the then-record passer rating of 112.8. He’s also worth noting was the great-great-great-grandson of Brigham Young, the Mormon leader for whom the university is named – which made his college choice either fate or a very on-brand decision, depending on how you look at it.
His Tampa Bay numbers – the 3-16 record, the 55 percent completion rate, the twice as many interceptions as touchdowns – are still part of his official record. They always will be. But those two seasons function less as evidence of who Young was and more as a before-and-after that shows precisely what the right organizational context can do for a player. The Buccaneers didn’t develop a bad quarterback. They mismanaged a great one, and then let Bill Walsh clean up their assessment for them.
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