The Bucs are running out of room to keep pretending this is fixable on the fly.
Todd Bowles’ seat has been scorching for a while, and after another rough stretch, the noise around his future is only getting louder. Tampa Bay won’t make a move this week with Thursday Night Football against the Dallas Cowboys next on the schedule, but after that game the team will have a mini-bye and a real decision to make. The Bucs are 9.5-point underdogs, and Bowles is 3-12 over his last 15 games.
That’s the easy part. The hard part is figuring out what comes next.
Because the problem isn’t just whether the Bucs should move on. It’s that the staff around Bowles doesn’t offer a clean answer. There isn’t an obvious veteran coach waiting in the wings to steady the ship, and there isn’t a coordinator you can point to and say he’d clearly bring a sharper edge, better detail, or a fresh voice.
The offensive option, Zac Robinson, doesn’t exactly make the case for promotion. His time in Atlanta had some bright spots - the run game finished in the top five over his two seasons there, Drake London got the most out of the setup, and his scheme helped keep quarterbacks cleaner than the line might have on its own. But none of that has translated in Tampa Bay.
The Bucs are sitting as a middle-of-the-pack running team. They are one spot away from dead last in EPA/dropback.
And when you remove defensive and special teams touchdowns from the equation, they rank 27th in scoring offense as of this writing. That is not the profile of a coach you hand the whole operation to.
If this is what the offense looks like with Robinson focused on one side of the ball, it’s hard to imagine the full-time version being better.
The defensive side is no more comforting.
George Edwards and Larry Foote split Thursday media availability as co-coordinators, with Edwards handling the pass game and Foote the run game. Edwards has the stronger resume for a temporary leap, thanks to his previous run as defensive coordinator for the Minnesota Vikings from 2014-2019. Still, he has never been in charge of a building, even on an interim basis.
Foote has even less to lean on in that kind of role. He has coached since 2015, moving between outside linebackers and inside linebackers jobs, and all of it has come under Bowles. Expecting him to suddenly deliver a dramatically different approach feels like a stretch.
If the Bucs were forced into an interim move, Edwards would probably be the cleaner choice to handle the overall operation, with Foote stepping in as interim defensive coordinator. That setup at least gives the team one coach overseeing the big picture and another running the defense.
It could improve the details. It could create a little more order.
But even that raises the bigger question: to what end?
Bowles looks like a lame-duck unless something completely unexpected happens, and Tampa Bay seems to be waiting for the 2027 offseason to hit the reset button with a new coaching staff. In that sense, moving on from him now might actually work against the long-term plan.
The roster has shown enough in the past to suggest it’s not broken beyond repair. Liam Coen proved what this group can do with the right coaching, and the Jaguars’ 4-13 season before he arrived is part of that picture.
There’s also this: for all the ugly football, the offensive issues, and the late-game defensive collapses, the Bucs still haven’t lost a game by more than one score this season.
So the organization is stuck with a bad choice, not a good one. The right coach isn’t already in the building.
Even a modest upgrade doesn’t seem obvious. At this point, keeping Bowles and riding out the season may be the path that serves the 2027 version of the Bucs best, even if it’s not popular right now.
A rough year could still land them a top-three pick in the 2027 NFL Draft, and that kind of draft capital might be the cleanest way for the next coach to try to engineer a worst-to-first turnaround in one offseason.
In Other News...
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It fit the mood around Tampa Bay, where the Bucs came in at 0-3 and were turning to undrafted rookie Jalon Daniels at quarterback because of Baker Mayfields injury. Green Bay arrived at 1-2, but the game was about more than the records for Tampa Bay supporters, who had little patience to spare and plenty of time to notice, and react to, anything that stood out. [Read more 🡒]
Todd Bowles Just Became The Center Of Tampa Bay's Biggest Debate
The Buccaneers slow start has pushed Todd Bowles into the middle of a conversation nobody in Tampa Bay wanted to have this early. At 0-4, with a 3-12 record stretching back to last season, the losses are piling up fast enough to turn every miscue into a referendum on direction, execution and leadership. Bowles stepped to the podium after the latest setback and owned the mess, taking responsibility while insisting he still believes he can guide the team out of it.
Bowles has handled the public side of the slump the way a veteran coach usually does, but the frustration around the team is only growing because so many of the defeats have stayed within reach. Close games tend to sharpen the focus on the head coach, and if the Buccaneers keep coming up short in those spots, the accountability debate will only get louder. For now, Bowles is asking for patience, even as the results make that a harder sell by the week. [Read more 🡒]