By MIKE LOPRESTI
Gannett News Service

Today's victims caught in the headlights are the defending Super Bowl champions. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

Stick a cutlass in them.

They would appear to be done. A 4-6 team that cannot win at home - one victory in five games. Cannot discipline itself - leading the league in penalty yardage. Cannot even do what it did better than anyone, which is play defense. Soon-to-be ex-champions. The latest proof of the slippery slope at the top of the NFL.

Remember the old days? When the Buccaneers could suffocate a team, and Jon Gruden had all the answers?

You know. The old days. Ten months ago.

But here's the first hint something is amiss in Tampa Bay. The current standings.

The Buccaneers have four victories. The Cincinnati Bengals have five.

Ah, the NFL teeter-totter is busy again. What is down eventually comes up, even in Cincinnati. And who goes up has to come down, often with a thud.

When the Bucs are officially eliminated one of these Sundays soon - the Oakland Raiders having already imploded like an old hotel whose time has run out - it'll mean for the second straight year, both Super Bowl teams will miss the playoffs the next season.

So we shouldn't be surprised. Not that the Bengals are tied for first place, which is like Alice in Wonderland. And not that the Raiders have plummeted, their play catching up with their birth certificates.

But the weekly fourth quarter melting of the Tampa Bay defense? That is something no one could have seen coming.

The Bucs have lost five of seven, and most of the games came with a similar plot device. When the game was on the line, the other teams rammed it down Tampa Bay's gullet.

Indianapolis. New Orleans. Carolina.

And just Sunday, in an absolutely essential home game with Green Bay, the Buccaneers lost because the Packers - led by a quarterback with a broken thumb -- marched to the winning touchdown with a 98-yard drive that used 9 minutes and 42 seconds. Time enough to defrost a roast, or cook the last of Tampa Bay's postseason chances.

This was the defense that gave up 196 points all last season and demanded to be considered among the finest ever. "It needs to be someplace in the history books," Gruden said after the Super Bowl.

Now they can't even stop the Saints.

"In the past," Simeon Rice said, "when the game went on, we got stronger. This year, we get weaker."

No more brash talk of dominance. Just vows to fight to the finish. The Buccaneers started the season in the penthouse and will end it in their own Alamo.

"We have six more ballgames," Warren Sapp was saying. "You're going to get our best. You're going to count on it."

"We expect every man," Gruden was saying, "to finish the season with authority."

Endangered species talk that way. And teams in a corner. Not that long ago, these guys were chatting up Super Bowl media day. Now the questions are very different.

The Bucs will soon go in the exhibition case as the latest artifact on why it is so hard to repeat. Both the roster and karma change. Fame dulls the hunger. Everyone is out to get you. It's happened before.

Gruden was a candidate for coaching sainthood last January. Now he can't get his team to stop yellow-flagging itself to death. Only five teams have gone from Super Bowl champion to losing record in one year. The Bucs have six weeks to avoid it.

"We just have to figure out," Keyshawn Johnson said. "what the hell we're doing wrong."

Sure. But if it were that easy, everybody would do it.

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