Comprised of castoff veterans and a gaggle of talentless rookies, the Mets were coached by Casey Stengel, a seven-time World Series winner with the Yankees, who had a McKay-like comicalness of his own.

The only parallel, perhaps, is the 1962 New York Mets, the ill-fated National League expansion team that lost an astonishing 120 games, the most in pro baseball since 1899. The fact is, few, if any, teams today are transcendently terrible few capture the national consciousness or tickle the funny bone quite like the original Yucks. I pick up the story below, on pages 195 through 197 of my new book, The Yucks! Two Years in Tampa with the Losingest Team in NFL History: In short order, these three researchers found the earliest known references to the quote, which derived not from McKay or Stengel, but from a cartoon about a girl playing the piano, printed in an Oregon newspaper, in 1894. Intrigued, I emailed the gifted etymologist Barry Popik, who’d written a blogpost on the quote, and he in turn queried fellow etymologists Ben Zimmer and Garson O’Toole.

I didn’t think much of it, at the time, but later, as I examined the similarities between the 1976-77 Bucs and the 1962 New York Mets-America’s greatest “lovable losers”-I found that legendary Mets’ coach Casey Stengel is also believed to have said it. But, as I began researching the early Bucs for a book I was writing, I found that everyone seemed to repeat the quote, but no one actually recorded when and where it was said. However, McKay’s most famous quote, bar none, was in answer to the question: “What do you think of your team’s execution coach?” To which McKay replied, “I’m in favor of it.”īeing a Bucs fan born and raised in Florida, I’d heard this quote repeated for most of my life. “What we need is a neutral site.” Or, when McKay cut kicker Bill Capece at the end of the 1983 season, the coach quipped, somewhat callously, “Capece is kaput.” There are whole articles of McKay quotes- here and here and here. Funny, loquacious, and entertaining, but bitingly sarcastic, McKay, wrote sports historian Steven Travers, said “some of the funniest things in the history of coach-speak.”įor example: “We can’t win at home and we can’t win on the road,” he once said. Winner of four national championships at USC, McKay was one of the best coaches in the business, the equivalent, in the 1970s, of Alabama’s Nick Saban or Ohio State’s Urban Meyer. In October 1975, John McKay became the first-ever coach of the NFL’s newest expansion franchise, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

Gambling sayings