Bucs HC Bowles: “This Is My Team, Not Bruce’s Team”

With the struggles of the Bucs on offense and the frustration over the play calling of Byron Leftwich, there’s been an idea floated out. Would Todd Bowles consider asking Bruce Arians to call plays? Or seek out his advice on how to fix the problems?

Arians stepped down as head coach of the Bucs in March of 2022. His main reason for that was to open the line of succession that would give his defensive coordinator, Bowles, an opportunity to become head coach again when that opportunity may not have presented itself another time around. Arians also moved up to the  Bucs’ front office as a senior football consultant to general manager Jason Licht.

Although Bowles is at the helm, the core nucleus of the Bucs’ coaching staff is in tact. That includes Leftwich at offensive coordinator, which is averaging 10 less points than they did a season ago. The Bucs have only had two games all season where they scored more than one touchdown.

Would Bowles turn to Arians with it being needed? After all, he is the architect of what Tampa Bay is doing.

“Well, this is my team, not Bruce’s team,” Bowles said.  “But we talk all the time. You don’t jumpstart by asking a former coach what to do. We have our own things to deal with and we understand that. We’ve been with Bruce long enough to know what he wants, but they’ve been with me to know what I want. We’re working towards that and we’ll get through it.”

Bowles Realizes There Were Huge Roster Changes

There are other factors as to why the Bucs haven’t produced on offense. There’s a lot of new faces in because their former key players are either retired, out of the league, signed with another team or injured. Of course the retired ones are Rob Gronkowski and Ali Marpet. Antonio Brown ran himself out of the league with both on and off the field antics. Alex Cappa signed with the Bengals and Ryan Jensen injured his knee in training camp and won’t be back any time soon.

That’s a lot of marquee names to replace. And in their spot are just players that aren’t of the same skill level as the Gronk’s, Marpet’s and Brown’s of last season. It’s not fair to expect Cade Otton, Luke Goedeke and Russell Gage to play at that level either. It’s a different team that’s having results that Bucs fans haven’t seen in a while. It’s also led to less explosive plays down the field through six games.

 “We want to score, I want big plays too,” Bowles said.  “But you don’t chase them just to chase them. There are parts within the game in which you have to take them and hope they come through. Obviously we have different players than we had last year and we’ve got to approach things a little differently and find out what works best for us this year, not last year and two years ago.

“[The] lineup is completely different – ‘Gronk’ (Rob Gronkowski) is gone, ‘AB’ (Antonio Brown) is gone, [Ali] Marpet is gone, Ryan [Jensen] is down. We’ve got different people to adjust to different things so you can’t really compare and say, ‘We’re going to do what we did last year, this year’ when the guys are different.”

Bucs HC Todd Bowles – Photo by: Cliff Welch/PR

And on the flip side of it. If they don’t have the same personnel, shouldn’t there be more schemes to open everything up and make it a little bit easier for everyone to get the best results? Bowles admitted that all of the coaches have to do better in that area.

“It’s up to us as coaches to make that happen and design plays to make that happen,” Bowles said. “The players have to play better, but we have to coach it better. We understand we’re different and we’re making the adjustments – we’ll be fine as a staff making those adjustments going forward. It’s really not anybody’s idea or thing that we’re not doing, we just have to come together and understand who we are and that we’re not [the team we were] last year because of the people being different.

“We have to find different way to get explosive [plays] – that’s a coaching thing and then that’s a playing thing. I think we’re working in the right direction and we’ll be okay with it.”