would play major league baseball instead, signing a contract with the Kansas City Royals and leaving the Bucs as the NFL's laughingstock. Doug Williams Culverhouse's treatment of quarterback Doug Williams caused resentment not only on the team, but in the entire Bay Area community. Williams led the Buccaneers to the playoffs in three of his five years with the team, and was considered to be their single most important player. However, he was only paid $120,000 a year, which ranked 42nd among NFL quarterbacks, was less than what some teams' third-string quarterbacks made, and was lower than the salary of Terdell Middleton, a running back who had two total carries in his two years in Tampa Bay. After the 1982 season, Williams asked for a $600,000 contract that would pay him among the league's top quarterbacks. Culverhouse refused to budge from his initial offer of $400,000, which he said would make Williams one of the five highest-paid quarterbacks in the league. Williams' agent disputed this, saying that Culverhouse's offer was substantially less than what several other quarterbacks made. With negotiations at a standstill, the Buccaneers traded the following season's first-round draft pick to the Cincinnati Bengals in exchange for Jack Thompson, a backup quarterback who had been unable to unseat Ken Anderson, as an insurance policy should Williams prove impossible to sign, or have trouble recovering from offseason knee surgery. Williams interpreted this as a sign that the team did not want him, and instead signed a contract with the Oklahoma Outlaws of the United States Football League. Adding injury to that insult, Williams later made an NFL comeback and signed with the Washington Redskins in 1986, and led the Redskins to a Super Bowl win in 1987, winning Super Bowl XXII and winning the Super Bowl MVP award. His hard line with Williams created the perception that Culverhouse was more concerned with profits than with putting a winning team on the field. It aroused suspicions that Culverhouse's main concern was the Buccaneers' salary structure, and that this was related to the frequency with which the team traded away its first-round draft choices. Williams' comments that he would have been treated differently had he been white resonated with the Bay Area African American community, who saw the Buccaneers' ensuing on-field woes as retribution, boycotted Buccaneer games by the thousands, and commented that Culverhouse threw parties that cost more than what