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	New Tampa Bay coach Raheem Morris, left, and GM Mark Dominik are remaking the Bucs their own way, but they also stand on the shoulders of some excellent coaches and personnel men they've worked with over the years.

Posted by ESPN.com's Pat Yasinskas

TAMPA, Fla. -- Let's start this off by talking about baseball cards and composition books.

Sixth-grade stuff because ... well, because, ever since the Tampa Bay Buccaneers made Raheem Morris their coach and Mark Dominik their general manager, the running joke among fans is that the Bucs have put their franchise's future into the hands of a couple of sixth-graders.

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Let's get it straight right now. Morris and Dominik are young. Morris is 32 and the league's youngest head coach. Dominik is 38 and, on looks alone, probably would have an easier time passing for a frat boy than a general manager.

But these two men are far more qualified to be where they are than the average fan realizes. Part of the reason for that, all kidding aside, is because Morris and Dominik once were sixth-graders, just like all of us. They've moved on, but both are still carrying pieces of the past. And that's not a bad thing.

Baseball cards and composition books helped get Dominik and Morris where they are and those same things are going to help shape the future of the Buccaneers.

If you want to make some easy money, go out and buy as many Josh Freeman rookie cards as you can find. Once upon a time, that's exactly what Dominik would have done. Heck, it's pretty much the same thing Dominik and Morris did, much to the chagrin of Bucs fans, when they selected the Kansas State quarterback in the first round of the April draft.

	Cliff Welch/Icon SMI
	Mark Dominik's first major decision as general manager was to cut Bucs icon Derrick Brooks.

Pick that move apart -- and Tampa Bay fans have been doing that continually -- but just remember Dominik has a pretty good track record of knowing when to buy and sell. He ran a baseball card store (yeah, he sold football cards, too) and went to card shows and flea markets to put himself through college. He also built one heck of a collection.

They're just about all gone now. Those cards paid the tuition at Kansas University -- and then some.

"Take a look at my wife's hand next time you see her," Dominik said with a laugh when asked what happened to all those cards.

Well, he does have a 1951 Ted Williams, a 1933 Babe Ruth and a 1933 Lou Gehrig locked away in a safe-deposit box somewhere. But that's it.

Long before the market crashed on baseball cards, Dominik was smart enough to do some wheeling and dealing to get an education and a wife.

Dominik is a collector at heart, as is his colleague Morris. But Morris and Dominik aren't the kind of people who collect something and let it waste away in an attic. They've got a common belief -- and track record -- of collecting only the very best from the past and using it for the future.

"Mark and I have been lucky enough to work with some of the very best coaches and personnel guys ever," Morris said. "We've taken some things from every one of them. Now, it's our job to reiterate the good things we learned from each of them, put it in our own voice and make it come alive.''

That's where the composition books come in. Unlike the baseball cards, they're still around.

The really good ones, filled with words of wisdom from the likes of Monte Kiffin, Mike Tomlin, Ronde Barber and Jon Gruden, are spilling out of the drawers of Morris' office at One Buccaneer Place. There even are a few notebooks from Morris' first coaching days at Hofstra that, as of last month, were still at his mother's house in New Jersey. But plans were being made to get them to Tampa soon.

Morris needs all the help he can get as a first-time head coach, and the composition books just might be The Book on coaching. They're filled with Morris' handwriting, but the words come from dozens of other voices.

"I collect composition pads," Morris said. "I write down all the good stuff I got from people. It doesn't have to be just the coaches I work with. It's stuff I might hear from coaches around the league or players I work with. There's stuff from Ronde Barber and guys like that in my composition pads. It might just be a favorite saying he has or a belief he has that I think is significant. I'm going to put that in my book and try to formulate it and pattern it into my own life."

Call it the gospel according to Kiffin, Tomlin and Gruden, but those composition books are jammed with some serious football information.

Al Messerschmidt/Getty Images
Bucs coach Raheem Morris collected composition pads filled with knowledge passed down from other coaches he has worked with.

"Critical comments," Morris said. "Critical movements. Situational football. All the things you think about every day when you're talking about developing a plan and developing a football team. You've got to formulate your own ideas and your own opinions. I realized early on there was so much knowledge there that it was impossible to just remember it all. You've got to write it down."

But nowhere in all those pages is there an exact formula for drafting or not drafting Freeman. Nowhere in all those ideas Morris has written down and nowhere in Dominik's tenure learning at the sides of Bruce Allen, Rich McKa
y, Jerry Angelo and Tim Ruskell (and Dominik's got more than a few binders with lessons learned from each of them), was there anything to tell you what to do about Derrick Brooks.

Gruden and McKay never had to make a decision like the one Dominik and Morris did. In their first real move, they simply cut Brooks, who was by far the best player ever for the Buccaneers and perhaps one of the best human beings to step on a football field. Brooks was 36 and the Bucs were looking to get younger, but still, we're talking about Derrick Brooks.

"There is no right time to cut guys," Morris said. "There is no right time to draft a first-round quarterback. You just have to believe that what you're doing is right and just go do it."

Dominik and Morris went ahead and did it, cutting four other beloved veterans, including Warrick Dunn and Joey Galloway, that same day.

These weren't sixth-grade kids tossing around cards. These were grown men, taking every lesson of their lives into account and trying to do the right thing even if it looked so wrong to the fans.

"We knew that we wanted to get younger," Dominik said. "We wanted to get very competitive. None of those five guys were easy decisions or something where we just sat there and decided it in one setting or one afternoon. They were all decisions that we hashed out over quite some time. We talked about it over and over each night, 'Is this what we want to do? Is this the direction we want to go?'

"They weren't easy decisions. I would hope they're never categorized as that because it's never easy to release a player of the caliber and the makeup of a Derrick Brooks. But it was a direction that we felt like we wanted to go. We felt like we had a plan that we could initiate if we made some tough decisions and that's what we did."

Consider the departure of Brooks and the drafting of Freeman as concrete proof that Dominik and Morris truly are way beyond sixth grade and a time when the perceptions of others mean everything.

If your goal is to be popular, you don't cut Brooks. You let him hang around for a year and promise him a lifetime job as something like vice president in charge of sitting on the bench. And you sure as heck don't draft Freeman when your fan base, which never has had the luxury of knowing what the term "franchise quarterback" truly means, is screaming for a defensive player.

"Sure, you think about what the reaction is going to be," Dominik said. "Human nature says that you want to appease and appeal to a lot of people."

But reality says that sometimes you have to do something that's unpopular or painful if you truly want to succeed.

"I've been here for 14 seasons, but over the last five or six, I would say that we've been known as quarterback collectors," Dominik said. "We drafted Josh Freeman and I'm a quarterback collector now? Well, the idea was not to become a quarterback collector. The idea was to get one franchise quarterback and, basically, make him our collection."

If Morris and Dominik can somehow synthesize all the ideas and information they have gathered, they just might be able to turn their collection into a ring.