It’s Become Clear the Buccaneers Need to Make Real Changes

Tampa Bay has lost six of seven games, and suddenly there are questions to ask about Todd Bowles’s future and the whole post–Tom Brady era.

After a promising start to the season, the Buccaneers have lost six out of seven games. / Jim Dedmon-Imagn Images

Sometimes the end is a mystery. There is conflicting information; the good and the bad are so intertwined that it’s hard to make sense of whether you’re living through hell or the good old days. This is especially true when it comes to both evaluating marriages and cheering for the Buccaneers, a team that has run the cycle between the height of football intelligentsia hyperbole and the sting of end-of-season performances that never quite live up to the idea we have of this team and its potential. 

After a 23–20 loss to the Panthers, in a game that dramatically swings both Tampa Bay’s playoff odds and chances of winning the division (though not as badly as it would have affected the Panthers if the Buccaneers had won), the state of the Buccaneers has never been more fraught, despite the franchise’s recent successes. After falling from 6–2 to 7–8, the need for some kind of ending is now more obvious, and less like the shades of gray you encounter in everyday life. Here’s a team that won a Super Bowl in 2020, has since transitioned coaches and quarterbacks, and has finished under .500 once (by just a game). And in that sub-.500 season, the Buccaneers still made the postseason. The Buccaneers have top-10 players in the NFL at—depending on your debate skills—five different positions. The team has been a factory for producing successful head coaches, including Dave Canales, who beat the Buccaneers on Sunday and Liam Coen, who is orchestrating another turnaround of equal measure in Jacksonville. 

Here, also, is a team that had an Offensive Rookie of the Year front-runner in Emeka Egbuka, whose dropoff has been greatly exaggerated but, at the same time, notable despite Egbuka having to switch positions and make a gigantic leap into being a team’s most weaponized threat. Baker Mayfield, whose MVP candidacy peaked in the middle of the season when he put together a résumé as a top-10 passer, has seen that case dwindle to nonexistent. Over the past five weeks of the season, Mayfield has essentially defined the league’s median in terms of quarterback play. Similarly, the Buccaneers’ defense has dropped to 29th over the past five weeks by EPA per play allowed, in front of only the Cardinals, Jets and Giants. Over the first three weeks of the season, Tampa Bay was third in EPA per play allowed.

Of course, some of this is attributable to the rigors of an NFL season. A team doesn’t just phone a 36-year-old pass rusher, like the Buccaneers did with Jason Pierre-Paul, unless there is an issue out of one’s control. The counter to this point? Head coach Todd Bowles would not have exploded in a sea of expletives at the podium after the Week 15 Thursday night collapse against the Falcons, wondering aloud whether his team wanted it, if the root cause of issues were merely an act of God. Some of these players have hit a wall. Some of them have made really poor situational mistakes. 

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On Tampa Bay’s potential game-winning or game-tying drive (which became a game-ending drive) Sunday, Mayfield and Mike Evans initiated two different phases of the scramble drill, resulting in an interception. Within Sunday’s 60 minutes were more fleeting visions of this split-personality team. All within the matter of a few drives, a 10-play touchdown drive full of tough runs and some nice designer play-calling. Then another drive, with a chance to flatline the Panthers early and go up 14–3, when Tampa implanted Vita Vea into the game as an offset fullback and Carolina so aggressively cheated toward Vea’s side that running back Sean Tucker was pushed more than five yards behind the line of scrimmage before needing to reverse field (Tampa Bay settled for a field goal). There was a play where Mayfield evaded a tackle and fired a bomb to Egbuka for 40 yards, and then a subsequent series of plays that included a run of minus-two yards, an incompletion and a delay of game. 

This is a team full of veterans and a tenured head coach who cannot shield a rookie, linebacker John Bullock, from headbutting an opponent before a critical drive. This is a team full of explosive weapons—and one of the best explosive play rates in the NFL—that is leaning on its 30-year-old quarterback as a runner for many of its explosive plays. 

The most logical leap is to change … something. In this particular case, turning over the head coaching position and bringing in a replacement for Bowles will be the solution that everyone points to because, in the absence of a thorough postmortem, we tend to blame dropoff or a lack of big-game energy on the person sitting in that chair. Bowles is 34–32 in four seasons and 1–3 in the playoffs, with the lone victory being the game that put the collapsing Eagles out of their misery in 2023. But Bowles folds neatly into the modern debate about Mike Tomlin during the past half decade, where there is a standard other lost fan bases would crave, especially considering that this has been a team in transition for three years now. 

It is clear that the Buccaneers cannot run it back. It is less clear how they should adapt. Like life, the Buccaneers have to decide if it could have been better, or if this was always going to be as good as it gets. 

And so we come through the other side with Tampa Bay very much in line to do what it has done in seasons past. Squeak into the playoffs and arrive there as a significant betting underdog, or, if the slide continues, miss the .500 threshold and miss the postseason altogether. Within that series of events, fans must ask themselves what they want and what they’d be willing to give up in order to get there, with no promise that anything improves at all. 

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