Rondé Barber’s unforgettable pick-six in the 2002 NFC Championship Game to silence Veterans Stadium and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to their first Super Bowl has been selected by thousands of fan votes as the Top Moment in franchise history. It had to beat out a field of 63 other memorable players, plays, games and trophies thrown over open water to take the crown, but specifically it won four head-to-head battles to make it to the Final Four.
First, Barber’s 92-yard sprint beat out an even longer play, the team-record 98-yard touchdown run by Ronald Jones against Carolina during the Bucs’ other Super Bowl season, in 2020. That led to a matchup with the Buccaneers’ 1982 season finale, in which Doug Williams led a 17-point comeback to beat Chicago in overtime and clinch a playoff spot. Williams’ team didn’t have enough steam to rally against Rondé, as it turned out.
The next round brought a very tough matchup, as the opponent was the first playoff victory in franchise history, a rousing 24-17 finale against the Eagles at Tampa Stadium in 1979 in which Ricky Bell famously ran 38 times for 142 yards. Bell couldn’t catch Barber any more than Jones could. Now in the finals for the Red Bracket, Barber came up against yet another running back, as fan voting had pushed Mike Alstott’s 19-yard pinball run off nine different Browns defenders past three other competitors. There may not be two more popular players in franchise history than Alstott and Barber, but the gravity of Barber’s pick-six won the day.
The Final Four voting was a four-way free-for-all, with Barber’s play and the Bucs becoming the first team in NFL history to play (and win) a Super Bowl in its own home stadium getting more votes than Derrick Brooks’ dagger of a pick-six in Super Bowl XXXVII and Mike Evans extending his 1,000-yard streak on the very last play of the 2024 regular season.
All that was left was for those two winning plays to go head-to-head in the championship final, and once again, there was no stopping the biggest moment of Barber’s illustrious career…and of the first half-century of Buccaneers football.
Here’s how all of the voting went down, from 64 moments down to win. In each case, the winning moment is presented in bold type.