Buccaneers history: Chargers shut out Tampa Bay 23-0 in their first home game

A week after losing their first ever game 20-0 in Houston, as this site has already told, the expansion Buccaneers finally got to play in front of their own fans. On September 19, 1976, Tampa Bay hosted the San Diego Chargers at Tampa Stadium for the first regular season home game in franchise history. The result was almost a photocopy of the week before: another shutout, this time 23-0. Saturday, September 19, 2026, marks fifty years to the day, one afternoon before the Buccaneers host the Cleveland Browns at Raymond James Stadium in their actual 2026 home opener.

Key facts

• On September 19, 1976, the San Diego Chargers beat the Buccaneers 23-0 in Tampa Bay's first ever regular season home game, at Tampa Stadium.
• Chargers kicker Toni Fritsch made three field goals, from 48, 48 and 22 yards, before San Diego added two touchdowns in the final three minutes.
• Tampa Bay's three quarterbacks, led by Steve Spurrier, combined for 3 completions on 18 attempts and negative net passing yards, on only 125 total yards of offense.
• The 0-14 start to 1976 became a 26 game losing streak once the Buccaneers lost their first 12 games of 1977 as well, still the longest in NFL history.
• Tampa Stadium, nicknamed the Big Sombrero, opened in 1967 with 46,481 seats and was expanded to 71,908 to bring the NFL to Tampa; it was demolished in 1999.

The Big Sombrero opens for business

Tampa Stadium had opened in 1967 as a 46,481 seat venue with no NFL tenant. When the league awarded Tampa Bay its expansion team in 1974, the city expanded the bowl to 71,908 seats. The new upper deck curved and undulated around the open end, a shape ESPN's Chris Berman later immortalized with the nickname "the Big Sombrero." The stadium hosted the Buccaneers for 22 seasons, plus two Super Bowls, before it closed in 1998 and was demolished in 1999 to make way for Raymond James Stadium next door.

For readers outside the United States: an "expansion team" is a brand new franchise added to a league, built from scratch with no existing roster, the way a new club might be formed rather than promoted. Tampa Bay was one of two such teams that season, along with the Seattle Seahawks, and both spent 1976 learning the NFL from the bottom up.

Three field goals, then a flood

San Diego controlled the game from the start. Chargers kicker Toni Fritsch, an Austrian who had played soccer for Rapid Vienna before becoming an NFL placekicker, made field goals of 48, 48 and 22 yards to put the Chargers up 9-0. Fritsch had only joined San Diego two weeks earlier, traded from the Dallas Cowboys on September 6; he would be waived after five games, but this was his moment. With three minutes left, San Diego pulled away for good: Rickey Young ran 46 yards for a touchdown, and Tom Hayes returned an interception 37 yards for another. The final score was 23-0.

Tampa Bay's offense could not answer. Steve Spurrier started at quarterback, backed up by Larry Lawrence and Parnell Dickinson, and the three combined for 3 completions on 18 attempts with three interceptions and negative net passing yards. The Buccaneers finished with just 125 total yards and five first downs to San Diego's sixteen. Head coach John McKay, in his first professional season after sixteen years at USC, had now seen his team shut out in both of its first two games. It would happen three more times before the season was over.

What 0-14 became

That 23-0 loss was Tampa Bay's second step toward an 0-14 debut season. The losing continued into 1977, when the Buccaneers dropped their first twelve games too, stretching the streak to 26 games, still the longest in NFL history. This site has already told that story in full, and the losing eventually gave way to the creamsicle years that followed, culminating decades later in Super Bowl titles the 1976 roster could not have imagined.

Fifty years on, the gap between that afternoon and now is the story of an entire franchise. The Buccaneers who take the field against Deshaun Watson and the Browns this Sunday are 0-1, not 0-2, and play in a stadium built to replace the one where this all started. But the calendar lines up almost exactly: fifty years and a day after Tampa Stadium's first NFL crowd watched their new team get shut out, Raymond James Stadium hosts the Buccaneers' first home game of a very different season.