The Tampa Bay Buccaneers have had a bumpy ride this season, but they couldn't be in a better spot with four games left to play. Despite a four-game losing streak that nearly sunk them, the Bucs enter the home stretch in the first place and in control of their playoff destiny.
That's not a place we all thought the team would be a few weeks ago.
Going into the bye week, Tampa Bay has lost four straight heartbreakers, all of which turned up the heat under head coach Todd Bowles' seat. Fans began to turn on him more and more as the losing continued, but the calls for his job might have been a bit premature.
Since the bye week, Bowles' much maligned defense has become the top scoring unit in football. The Bucs are allowing just 14.3 points per game despite being down a number of starters all across the defense. That's been a missing piece of the argument when criticizing the job Bowles has done, as he's trying to run the same defense he always has with half the parts.
That doesn't excuse some of the mistakes he's made, but it's something that more and more folks close to the team are starting to point out.
Another former Buccaneers player is defending the job Todd Bowles has done this season
Former Buccaneers player Ian Beckles, who isn't afraid to criticize the team, defended Bowles on a recent episode of his podcast. In his mind, Bowles has overachieved by not allowing a slew of bad breaks to pile up the way other coaches have tended to do.
“I don’t know if there is a coach who has overachieved more than Todd Bowles in the last few years,” Beckles said. “Every one of our stars go down. Every one of our stars — both receivers went down. We’re still here. Both of our safeties go down. We’re still here."
He also lumped 'the great' Joe Tryon-Shoyinka in there which sort of feels out of place but he's yet another starter who has missed time due to injury that the team has needed to make up for not having.
Beckles has a point, and it's one that everyone from Gerald McCoy to Bruce Arians has echoed: Bowles has managed to do a better job than he's getting credit for. This season has been far from perfect, but lost in the angst over what has gone wrong is the nuance of why things have tilted the way they have.
If Bowles deserves criticism for his mistakes, he deserves credit for keeping the season on track as much as he has. Lesser coaches would allow the sort of hand that Bowles has been dealt to cripple the season. Look at what has happened with the Jets and Giants, two teams that have run into similar problems as the Buccaneers but are in far darker places.
Bowles has screwed a fair amount of things up, from his stubborn loyalty to some of his defensive schemes to his bizarre clock management, but he's arguably done far more good for the team. In back-to-back seasons the Bucs have run into rough patches that should have derailed their season but it didn't, and that starts with Bowles. He's the leader of the locker room and if there isn't buy-in then none of this works; we've seen it erode locker rooms elsewhere in the league and there's a reason it hasn't happened in Tampa Bay where it easily could have.
He's managed to do all of this while holding the team together as it falls apart due to injury. From Antoine Winfield Jr., Mike Evans, Chris Godwin, and Tristan Wirfs, the Bucs have been without key players at various points this year -- sometimes at the same time -- yet Tampa Bay is in first place and in control of its own playoff destiny.
There's nothing wrong with criticising some of the things Bowles has done wrong but the scale must be balanced with how good of a job he's done to make sure none of those mistakes end up sinking the team.
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