Tampa Bay Buccaneers co-owner Joel Glazer had some interesting things to say about the way things went for Byron Leftwich last season.
Let’s spare hyperbole, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers were awful last year.
What made the failure of last year particularly hard to stomach was how everything was lined up for a serious run at a Super Bowl. Tom Brady had come back for one more season, the team was essentially the same, and nothing suggested the team would regress as much as it did.
A blowout playoff loss to end a season with a losing record was nowhere on the BINGO card, yet that’s what happened. When things go as poorly as they did for the Bucs last season, someone always gets scapegoated.
That guy ended up being offensive coordinator Byron Leftwich.
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Despite being an architect of an offense that won a Super Bowl in 2020, Leftwich seemed to be singularly blamed for the way things fell apart last season.
Buccaneers co-owner thinks blaming Byron Leftwich isn’t fair
Buccaneers co-owner Joel Glazer spoke with JoeBucsFan recently and seemed to defend Leftwich in the face of the criticism he faced last year.
“Byron helped lead us to a Super Bowl championship. You know how sports is — whenever you don’t get the results everyone was hoping for, some people want to start looking in one area or another area,” Glazer said. “I never think it’s fair when anybody points to one person. It’s a team game, a team effort, and team result. Our record is our team record and doesn’t just fall on one person.”
That’s a little rich coming from the guy who signed off on Leftwich being fired at the end of the season, but he’s also not wrong.
For as easy as it is to place blame on Leftwich, it wasn’t all his fault. Injuries to the offensive line derailed the season before it could even get started, Brady needing to deal with personal matters that hung over the entire season threw off the team’s routine as far back as training camp, and it felt like the Bucs were playing catchup from there.
Leftwich did plenty of things wrong last year, but that’s just one season of failure. In the grand scheme of things, Leftwich helped the Bucs win a Super Bowl that no fan expected when he was hired and that’s how he should be remembered in Tampa Bay.