Bucs Should Consider Karl Dunbar

TAMPA — The coaching search for the Bucs extends beyond just the head coaching vacancy. The entire staff was relieved of their duties and Tampa is looking to fill all the holes.

The job to fill the positions may be left up to the ultimate head coach but a guy the Buccaneers should earmark is now former Minnesota Vikings defensive line coach Karl Dunbar who was fired this weekend after the Vikings 3-13 season.

The case for Dunbar may be hard to make given how much worse the Vikings defense was then the Buccaneers –and that’s saying a lot — but he’d actually be a great fit for this team.

Dunbar was a name that surfaced last offseason as a potential hire for the Buccaneers and Raheem Morris, and now ironically they could be sort of trading places. With Morris interviewing for the Vikings defensive coordinator job today in Minnesota, Dunbar should be strongly considered moving forward for the Bucs.

Should the eventual head coach call him up, Dunbar wouldn’t be a hard guy to get excited about. He has said he wants to be no more then a players position coach and during his time in Minnesota he made that his obvious forte.

His best season was 2008 when he coached a defensive line dubbed ‘Shock and AWWE’ that featured Jared Allen, Pat and Kevin Williams and Ray Edwards. That defensive line posted 48 sacks as a unit and stunted about every single running attack that came at

them.

Dunbar knows how to coach the defensive line and the Bucs defensive line needs coaching.

The Vikings had a bad defensive year in 2011 but the shining achievement of the team was Jared Allen’s chase for the sack record. Allen credits Dunbar among other factors in getting him the franchise record for sacks.

If Dunbar has talent he can develop it and the Buccaneers have that talent. If Dunbar gets on this staff he’d have guys like Adrian Clayborn, Da’Quan Bowers, Micheal Bennett, and Gerald McCoy to craft into the next best defensive line. This wouldn’t only be a great thing for Dunbar to have achieved yet again, but Bucs fans are no strangers to dominating lines. The days of Warren Sapp, and Simeon Rice are well remembered in times like these.

But the thing about Sapp and Rice is when they were at their peak, they were almost done with their careers. When Sapp and company won the Super Bowl in 2002 they were an aging unit. Allen and Company went a game away from the Super Bowl as an aging unit. Dunbar would inherit a young corps of players on the line that if he can develop would be good for a long time.

That’s something the Buccaneers haven’t seen in a while and when you need a violent change of pace like the one that is need in Tampa now, a stout young defense is the perfect thing to excite fans and Dunbar is a guy that knows how to do this.