The Tampa Bay Buccaneers were the most disappointing team in the NFL during the season itself, as they went from being discussed as a potential Super Bowl contender to completely collapsing and missing out on the playoffs entirely, which should have been a slam dunk for Tampa Bay in a division as terrible as the NFC South.
Many fans thought Todd Bowles should pay for another mediocre season with his job, and it almost seemed like the players were giving up on him and his lack of ideas in the second half of the season. And he was publicly throwing the players under the bus in press conferences, as well as blaming everything on Josh Grizzard instead of trying to help out himself as the head coach of the organization.
The Glazers kept Bowles and some of the heat under his seat has cooled, but for many around the NFL, the microscope is still firmly on Todd Bowles. And his reputation around the NFL, not just among the Buccaneers diehard fans, is quite low.
Todd Bowles is holding the Bucs back
Former Pro Football Focus analyst Sam Monson isn't afraid to tell some hard truths, and he recently made a prediction Tampa Bay Buccaneers fans may not like on his Check The Mic podcast. The Bucs win line is set at 8.5, and Monson said he is taking the under. His reasoning? A scathing review of the man in charge of the Buccaneers.
Monson said of the Bucs, as captured by Joe Bucs Fan, “I generally think this idea of like a game has passed a coach by is at a minimum overstating these types of things; if you’re going to ask that about anybody, though, I think Todd Bowles is the guy you’d ask it about. Like [Bowles] always had an unusual scheme defensively — how he goes about things, the blitz-heavy stuff. It does feel like [the Bucs defense] has been exposed more in recent years. Do teams just understand how to play his defense now? And if they do, it’s too exploitable. And ironically, one of the guys that’s exploited it the most is now on the coaching staff on the other side of the ball. There’s then the question of, genuinely, does [Bowles] use [offensive coordinator] Zac Robinson to self-scout his defense? He should. A smart thing would be with Zac in the building is, ‘Hey, give me a two-page dossier of everything you did to attack me because Kirk Cousins should not be hanging 500 yards on my defense.'”
Everything Monson is saying here is 100 percent fair. That night against the Atlanta Falcons really exposed how out of his depth Todd Bowles is these days as a coach, including on the defensive side of the ball, and the Bucs are facing an impossible margin for error offensively with how porous the defense is. It's hard to win or reach a ceiling when the coach himself is capping it, and that is how the Bucs are viewed these days.
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