A potential nightmare scenario is developing for the Buccaneers with Liam Coen

This would be a huge blow to what Tampa Bay has built this year.

A nightmare scenario involving Liam Coen and Mike Greenberg is starting to lineup against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
A nightmare scenario involving Liam Coen and Mike Greenberg is starting to lineup against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. | Jason Mowry/GettyImages

Even though it’s been over a half decade since the Tampa Bay Buccaneers have needed to be active on Black Monday, the team was still forced to pay attention to what was happening this year. Despite the rantings of an angry portion of the fan base, the Bucs were not among the teams to fire their head coach this year, but the teams that did have turned an eye toward Tampa to try and find a solution to their problem.

Liam Coen has been a hot head coaching candidate all season and his stock has only risen with all that he’s done to help get the Bucs into the playoffs. He’s turned a good offense into one of the best in the league, and has finally fixed the NFL’s worst rushing attack as quickly as Bucky Irving glides down the field.

It’s been astonishing to watch Coen do what he did this year with Baker Mayfield, who finished the season with 41 touchdowns and now looks like a bargain at $100 million. That’s not easy to do, and it’s the type of stuff that has teams sniffing around trying to see if they can lure Coen away with a head coaching job.

One of those teams is the Jacksonville Jaguars, and news that they’ve officially requested an interview with Coen is that beginning of a potential nightmare scenario for the Bucs.

Jaguars could poach two top candidates from the Buccaneers this offseason

On Tuesday it was reported that the Jaguars had formally requested an interview with Coen, but nothing can actually happen until next week. Per NFL rules, Coen won’t be able to begin virtually interviewing for any head coaching job until three days after the Wild Card game on Sunday, and can’t do any in-person interviews until the Buccaneers have been eliminated.

Hopefully that’s not until February, which gives Tampa Bay extra incentive to make a deep playoff run.

It’s not only Coen the Bucs need to worry about losing this offseason. Assistant General Manager Mike Greenberg has been on radars since last year when the Carolina Panthers were rumored to be looking into him as a candidate. That trend has continued, as the New York Jets requested an interview with Greenberg this week and they likely won’t be the last team to do so.

Jacksonville fired Doug Pederson but retained general manager Trent Baalke, but if Shad Khan is smart — and he didn’t get all that money by being stupid — he’ll change his tune and make a run at Tampa Bay’s golden duo of candidates.

The Jaguars present a perfect scenario for the Bucs to lose both Coen and Greenberg. Khan’s best move is to fire Baalke and replace him with Greenberg as GM, who could then hire Coen as head coach. This would give Jacksonville the mastermind behind Tampa Bay’s high-powered offense as well as Jason Licht’s right-hand man and salary cap wizard.

Greenberg was instrumental in helping the Bucs navigate out of salary cap hell after Tom Brady retired, and created a new blueprint for dealing with dead money that other teams are trying to copy. Without the work that Tampa Bay’s front office did, the Broncos don’t have the confidence to move on from Russell Wilson and the Falcons might not give Kirk Cousins $180 million knowing they can eat most of it and live to tell the tale.

A lot of that was Greenberg, and he similarly helped draw up deals for Mike Evans, Baker Mayfield, Antoine Winfield Jr., and Tristan Wirfs that helped retain All-Pro talent at a team-friendly cost without shortchanging the talent. He’s a wizard, and any smart franchise would want him running the show — especially one like the Jaguars that seems so close to figuring it out.

If Coen and Greenberg went to Jacksonville, they’d inherit a roster that already has Trevor Lawrence, Brian Thomas Jr., and Evan Engram, with a backfield of Travis Etienne and Tank Bigsby that feels similar to Rachaad White and Bucky Irving. Giving those guys that kind of a head start is dangerous for the rest of the league, and it should be a no-brainer for Khan.

It’s also a nightmare scenario for the Bucs.

The good news is that this is back-to-back years where other teams are trying to pluck the fruits of Tampa Bay’s labor. Bowles has proven he can hire insanely talented coaches, especially is he loses two to head coaching jobs in as many years. He found Coen and would be able to advertise the Bucs’ job as a springboard to a bigger gig.

Same goes for Jason Licht, who has developed an increidble front office team that would miss Greenberg but isn’t setup to effectively replace him.

Ideally everything stays the way it is for at least one more year and this all becomes a 2026 conversation, but that’s not how these things work. Tampa Bay has a perfect system in place right now and the Jaguars have the perfect situation to steal a lot of it away.

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