After dodging bad luck all season, the bell finally tolled for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers on Sunday night. A season that probably should have ended back in October lasted until Wild Card Weekend, which marks back-to-back years where the Bucs overstayed their welcome and proved doubters wrong.
It's also the second year in a row we head into the offseason with questions about Todd Bowles' job as head coach.
A common theme all season was Bowles getting called out by a growing number of fans for the decisions he made. Part of what went wrong was out of his control, like the rash of injuries that piled up on the Bucs that severely depleted the defense. That's something that sunk Tampa Bay in the Wild Card as Jamel Dean needing to leave with an injury ended up being the straw that finally broke the Bucs' back.
Other stuff, like Bowles' struggles with clock management, have persisted so long that fans can't stand to deal with it anymore. In a dark twist that seems fitting to the discourse that followed him all year, the season ended with a bizarre time management situation with Bowles that has everyone scratching their heads.
Todd Bowles explains why the Bucs waited so long to call timeouts on Commanders game-winning drive
With just under a minute left the Bucs defense was trying to stop the Commanders and force a field goal to try and get the ball back in a tie game. Rather than use the timeouts to stop the clock, the Bucs let it run as Washington happily watched time melt away.
Tampa Bay eventually called the timeouts but it was after more than enough time had run off the clock and it seemed to paint the team into a corner.
After the game Bowles was asked what happened in that final sequence and he gave an answer that Bucs fans probably won't like.
"After the next play they only needed a yard for the first down, so we had to let it play out," Bowles explained. "Before the last play, we wanted to call timeout to see where they were ... and then we had a personnel problem so we called it later than normal."
Most fans seem predetermined to already not like whatever Bowles had to say, but even for his defenders it was a tough scene at the end of the game. This is now back-to-back seasons that have ended with questionable time management decisions by Bowles, even if there is some logic to what the strategy was.
It sounds like the Bucs were trying to thread the needle and hope that the Commanders made a mistake that allowed for the offense to have some timeouts left to work with. That almost happened, as Calijah Kancey nearly chased down Jayden Daniels on what would have forced a field goal with close to a minute left in the game.
Daniels slipped away from Kancey and scrambled for a first down, though, which rendered the strategy null and void.
On the one hand there's logic in Bowles trying to avoid playing to tropes and burning his timeouts to preserve clock that might end up lost anyways. It's an unconventional approach, but one that borders a little too close to recklnessness and malpracrice.
At the very least it's the type of thing that makes the discourse around his future with the team even messier than it already was. Now that the season is over, Liam Coen is going to interview for head coaching jobs and the Bucs risk losing him and all that he was building. Bowles has proven he can hire the right guy -- both of his previous hires becoming head coaches after just one season is a pretty impressive feat -- but there's some traction to the idea that Coen should replace him.
There isn't a ton of juice behind that, and there are other ways the Bucs might be able to convince Coen to stay, but it doesn't help that this is the lasting impression Bowles left at the end of the season. In all likelihood Bowles is back next year and Coen decides to go the Ben Johnson route and further improve his stock, but nobody did themselves any favors about what happens next with how the season ended on Sunday night.
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