Bears Maul Tampa for 3rd Straight Win : Chicago Makes It Easy for Ditka to Keep His Cool

TAMPA, Fla. —  The Chicago Bears are making it easy for Mike Ditka to keep his cool on the sideline.

“Any time you win 10 games, you have to be proud of your team,” Ditka said Sunday after Neal Anderson ran for 2 touchdowns and Mike Tomczak passed for another to lead a 27-15 victory over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

“We did not play a great game, but you still have to win that kind,” added Ditka, on the sideline for the second time since suffering a mild heart attack on Nov. 2. “We made mistakes in some critical situations, and you can’t do that and get momentum going.”

The Bears rolled to their third straight victory after opening a 14-0 lead in the first 8 minutes. A lopsided winner at Washington last week in Ditka’s return to the bench, Chicago improved to 10-2 with its 12th consecutive victory against Tampa Bay.

Anderson scored on runs of 1 and 17 yards in the first quarter, and Brad Muster turned a screen pass into a 40-yard touchdown 6 minutes before halftime before a sellout crowd of 67,070 in Tampa Stadium.

Tampa Bay, which hasn’t beaten its NFC Central Division rival since the final game of the 1982 regular season, fell to 3-9 after its sixth loss in the past 7 games.

Tomczak, starting for the third time this season in place of the injured Jim McMahon, completed 9 of 21 passes for 179 yards and had 2 passes intercepted.

The victory was Chicago’s second against the Bucs in 3 weeks and hiked Tomczak’s record as a NFL starter to 14-2 overall, including 6-0 against Tampa Bay in 4 seasons.

The Chicago defense, coming off an impressive performance in the Bears’ 34-14 destruction of Washington, intercepted 2 passes by Vinny Testaverde and kept Tampa Bay from scoring on three possessions that began inside the Bears’ 40-yard line.

Testaverde, who revealed last week that he is colorblind and at times has trouble distinguishing the Bucs’ home orange jerseys from visitors’ white, had his first pass of the game intercepted by Singletary and returned to Tampa Bay’s 14 to set up Anderson’s first touchdown.

The second-year quarterback hit just 7 of 22 passes for 86 yards before veteran Joe Ferguson replaced him midway through the fourth period.

“You have to play an almost perfect game to beat the Bears. Things went wrong from the start,” Testaverde said.

Testaverde, who has thrown a NFL-leading 28 interceptions, was more effective as a runner, scrambling for 55 yards in 5 carries to lead a rushing attack that produced 168 yards.

The Bucs’ ineffectiveness inside the Bears’ 10, however, forced Tampa Bay to settle for Donald Igwebuike field goals of 27 and 23 yards, the latter with no time remaining in the first half after the scoreboard clock was stopped in error for an estimated 7 seconds.

Art McNally, the supervisor of NFL officials, said the clock was stopped after a Testaverde completion to Bruce Hill with 8 seconds remaining but that none of the officials on the field noticed the error.

An estimated 7 seconds elapsed before the clock was restarted, giving Tampa Bay--out of timeouts--enough time to send in its field goal unit and snap the ball with 1 second left.