Championship Sunday has come and gone and all eyes seem to be focused on Super Bowl 59, where the Kansas City Chiefs are attempting to make NFL history. That’s not where most of the attention was earlier in the week, though, where a different kind of history was made with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers smack dab in the middle of it all.
We thankfully seem to be on the other side of the Liam Coen drama, which unfolded in ways that made script writers over at Bravo! blush. By now we all know what happened: Coen burned the Bucs after agreeing to return, ghosting them when it came time to sign his contract in order to become the Jacksonville Jaguars head coach.
It was a dramatic 36 hours and the fallout has been just as spectacular and messy. Stones have been thrown on both sides, with Coen saying he was “strong-armed” into agreeing to the richest deal a coordinator has ever received, to the Bucs reportedly being as irate as NFL reporters have ever seen a team get over a coach leaving.
Everyone is still sifting through what happened, but it seems each new thing we learn makes the situation even more wild than it already was.
NFL insider suggests Buccaneers could have fired Todd Bowles to keep Liam Coen
Just about every NFL insider added some new wrinkle to the story in the days after Coen left. Adam Schefter said Coen felt forced into taking a deal with the Bucs, Albert Breer revealed how massive the contract would have been, and Jeff Darlington suggested something fans had been openly pondering all season.
Throughout the year, cries from fans for the team to fire Todd Bowles in order to keep Liam Coen grew louder. It got to the point where it truly seemed like the Bucs would have a fork in the road situation this offseason, but it was largely downplayed as just social media noise from angst fans.
As it turns out, Darlington suggested there might have been some truth to it all.
"Perhaps the most delicate and complicated component to Liam Coen’s pending departure to Jacksonville, there were many with the Bucs’ organization who internally recognized Coen is ready to be a head coach," Darlington reported. "Had Bowles’ team not made the playoffs, there was a very real world where Coen replaced him."
That didn't happen, as the Bucs bounced back from a mid-season losing streak to win six of their last seven games to secure a fourth straight NFC South title. The team came within a doinked field goal in the Wild Card game from potentially going to overtime and beating the Washington Commanders, and given all of the injuries the team suffered it’s hard to not see the season as a success.
Bowles has been a big part of back-to-back midseason turnarounds, which is not something we’re used to seeing in Tampa Bay. Lesser teams have succumb to what the Bucs were up against over the last two years, yet we’re still in the midst of the most successful stretch in franchise history.
Despite the very legitimate things that Bowles deserves criticism for, all of the positive rolled up to overshadow the negatives that would have led to him being fired. Still, it seems that the suggestion from fans that he should be replaced was at least on the table had things not gone the way they did which means there’s a universe where Liam Coen is the head coach in Tampa Bay right now.
This is not the universe where that’s happening, though. Most of the ‘Fire Bowles’ noise has quieted, though, thanks in large part to the anti-Coen movement that has started.
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