The sun set on Week 16 with two former colleagues in very different places, and it's driving Tampa Bay Buccaneers fans crazy.
Todd Bowles and the Buccaneers prepared for a restless night after losing to the Panthers in a game that cost them a spot in the playoff picture. It's a loss that pretty much seals Bowles' future as head coach. Meanwhile, Liam Coen and the Jaguars celebrated a signature victory over the Broncos, a win that could propel them to the No. 1 seed in the AFC. He has completely changed the culture in Jacksonville and ushered in a career-changing turnaround for Trevor Lawrence; aside from what Ben Johnson has done with the Bears, nobody's position is envied more right now than the Jaguars.
All of this is an extra twist of the knife for Bucs fans. It's one thing to see another team having the sort of success the Jags are, but it's another to have been so close to having that yourself but letting it get out the door.
The Buccaneers should have fired Bowles to hire Liam Coen is a common refrain as fans sift through the rubble of Tampa Bay's season, but while it might feel like a simple solution it's not quite that easy.
It's pointless revisionist history to get upset the Buccaneers didn't hire Liam Coen as head coach
The juxtaposition of Tampa Bay's failure and Coen's success has amplified much of the frustration aimed at Bowles. It's undeniable that the Bucs have massively underperformed this season, and much of that falls at the feet of a head coach whose leadership has seemingly gone stale.
Where the Bucs were able to pull themselves out of back-to-back midseason slumps, it feels as though things have finally run their course. Change is going to come, and it will be much-needed, but it's revisionist history to suggest this season was even remotely close to being one in which Liam Coen was the head coach.
Rewind the tape back to February, when Bucs fans everywhere were united against Coen for the way he chose to leave the team. It was one of the snakiest moves anyone in the league had ever seen, with Adam Schefter reporting at the time that he'd never seen a team as angry as the Bucs were over the way Coen handled the situation.
That's what the sentiment was at the time, and it's only now that Coen has found success and essentially gotten the last laugh -- against the backdrop of the Bucs cratering -- that feelings have changed.
There are a few massive flaws in this logic, though.
For starters, even if the Bucs had pushed Bowles out for Coen it doesn't solve the absolutely massive injury variable. Coen is a brilliant offensive mind, but even he'd have a hard time running an offense the way he wants to with key pieces like Mike Evans, Chris Godwin, and Bucky Irving all missing.
Just because he'd head coach doesn't magically mean none of those guys get injured, or the team magically overcomes them more than they did.
Perhaps the biggest flaw in this logic is at the root. The Bucs did try to keep Coen and had an agreement to make him the highest-paid coordinator in NFL history. It felt like a perfect succession plan: Bowles coaches one more year before handing the reins over to Coen who would have spent another year fine tuning a league-leading offense. In this world, it's hard to not envision decision-makers in Tampa seeing it end with another Super Bowl title, while Bowles, Lavonte David, and other veterans retired on top.
The only problem was that Coen didn't want to wait that long and took a head coaching job ahead of schedule. A lot of that falls on the Bucs, who got high out of their minds on their own supply and assumed the franchise was an offensive coordinator factory — a lesson everyone learned the hard way.
Liam Coen is a Coach of the Year candidate, but he ghosted the Bucs after they offered him a record-breaking sum to stay, and he took another job. If we're following the logic that the Bucs should have fired Bowles to keep Coen, then should the Lions -- another team that took a significant step backward this year -- have fired Dan Campbell to keep Ben Johnson?
The would have/should have game is a dangerous one to play because it's easy to get lost. Of course the Bucs offense would have been better with Coen but the front office got overly confident that it was the system and not the man who was creating success.
Who can blame them? Dave Canales earned a head coaching job and was replaced by Liam Coen who did even better than him. The big gamble was that the Bucs could do it again, but that bet lost.
It's perfectly fine to be upset about what could have been, but once you start picking at that thread it never stops unspooling. The temporary relief of revising history might feel good but it distracts from the reality that needs to be dealt with, one in which the Bucs were a year too early on needing the head coach they wanted and now need to make sure they find the right one so we don't end up doing this all again sooner than anyone wants.