Buccaneers: Todd Bowles emerges as favorite to be next head coach

The stars are aligning for Todd Bowles to be the next head coach of the Buccaneers.

If the odds already favored Todd Bowles to be the next head coach of the Buccaneers, they have officially become too great to ignore as the team has shown its hand in preparing for the future.

Bowles has been one of the biggest reasons behind the recent success of the Bucs. The defense is now unrecognizable compared to the unit that took the field the year before Bowles arrived. Tampa went from having one of the worst defensive units in the league to one of the best almost overnight, and that is the Bowles effect.

Even as the NFL transitions to a league that promotes offense above all else, there is still some truth to the sentiment that defense wins championships. The Buccaneers are coming off a Super Bowl win where their opponent, one of the best offensive teams of all time, scored no touchdowns during the game.

Bowles has developed players, cultivated a renaissance amongst older players who were deemed past their prime, and helped elevate everyone else in the middle.

It doesn’t matter who you are in a Todd Bowles defense; you’re going to play a role, and you’re going to get better.

The past few seasons and uptick in player production speak for themselves when evaluating Bowles as a head coaching candidate again. Bowles gets mountains of undue criticism for struggling with the Jets, but we can all see that their problems go far beyond the head coach.

Regardless of that slight blemish on his record, Bowles had been just as influential in taking the Buccaneers to the Super Bowl as Bruce Arians, and the franchise just took one step closer towards acknowledging this fact.

While Arians still has a few seasons left at the helm, the Bucs did everything in their power to keep a future HC option on staff by extending Todd Bowles’ stay in Tampa as the highest-paid defensive coordinator in the NFL, according to Adam Schefter on Twitter.

Bowles will assuredly get some head coaching interviews during this next cycle, but the Bucs are at least making moves to show Bowles that they see him as the likely coach in waiting.

It is extremely unlikely that Bowles will make it all three years on this deal as an assistant, but it does give the Bucs a slightly better chance of winning out and keeping him as their next head coach.

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