Despite a collapse of epic proportions and a run of consecutive losses in the NFC South before a too little, too late Week 18 win over the Carolina Panthers, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers already confirmed to the rest of the NFL world that they are going to keep Todd Bowles for another season, albeit with an entirely new look staff after sacrificing the likes of Josh Grizzard at offensive coordinator (and an even more incompetent special teams coordinator).
The Buccaneers need to go back to the drawing board, clean house around Bowles, and find a way to save one of the most mediocre game managing head coaches in the business from himself. It is not necessarily a winning strategy, but it is nonetheless the strategy that the almost perennially complacent Glazers - just ask Manchester United fans - have chosen here.
But the wild thing is that the Buccaneers were oh so close to making one of the boldest splashes of the offseason right as it began. It all started with a report from ESPN's Adam Schefter stating that the agent of recently fired Baltimore Ravens head coach John Harbaugh told him that within an hour of his client being fired, seven NFL teams had called him with interest in the former Super Bowl winning coach.
Buccaneers reportedly thought about going after John Harbaugh to replace Todd Bowles
As Schefter noted, the funny thing about that is besides the Ravens themselves, there were only six other NFL teams with a head coaching vacancy after firing their leading men. Therefore, observers around the NFL figured that at least one team with an existing head coach had put out a feeler to Harbaugh with the possible intention of firing their own hot seat head coach in order to replace him with a seeming dream upgrade in Harbaugh.
Buccaneers fans saw that and got their hopes up that maybe, just maybe, the Bucs and the Glazers were thinking about hooking up with Harbaugh to ship Bowles off. And the funny thing about that is the conspiracy theorists were right.
Veteran NFL reporter Benjamin Allbright said, via Joe Bucs Fan, that the Buccaneers did actually call up Harbaugh and asked about what it would take for him to come to Tampa Bay. But the Glazers ultimately decided against hiring him because Harbaugh wanted his own GM as part of his demands, while the Bucs still want to stick with Jason Licht.
Although Licht has done some good things, there are plenty of Bucs fans who are putting him under the microscope, too. It makes sense for the Bucs not to want to shake things up by firing Licht, too, but since he has also been part of the complacency at the NFC South franchise, if Bowles flounders yet again while Harbaugh goes on to great success outside of Baltimore, perhaps Bucs fans wil look back on this and remember it as another grave mistake.