Todd Bowles On Losses: “I Don’t Think It’s Snowballed”

Things are not looking good for the 4-7 Tampa Bay Bucs and head coach Todd Bowles.

With Tampa Bay having lost six of the last seven games, his seat is continuing to get hotter. With the Panthers already letting go of their head coach Monday morning, Bowles could be next in line in short order if there is not a drastic turnaround to close out the season.

After the Bucs’ loss to the Bills last month, Bowles stated that the losses would not continue to pile up.

“It won’t snowball,” Bowles said at the time. “We got a lot of leaders in that locker room. A lot of leaders on the coaching staff. We have faith, we understand how tough we play, we just got to play smarter.”

Well since then, the Bucs are just 1-3.

When asked about his comments last month, Bowles doubled down when addressing the media.

Bucs HC Todd Bowles Does Not Think Losses Have “Snowballed”

What Todd Bowles said Monday was very similar to what he stated after the Bucs-Bills game.

“I don’t think it’s snowballed, I think we’re making mistakes at the wrong time,” Bowles said. “Whether we get down to the 1-yard line in the first quarter or whether we blow something on defense in the second half, and it’s a different guy every time.

“The effort’s there, the work is there. The snowball – yeah you want to win a ballgame. We’re desperate to win a ballgame, just one ballgame. But small things happen against different teams at different times. We can’t play the Bucs plus the opposition.”

Bowles is correct in his assessment of the team, but it is one thing to talk about it and another for the players to go out and avoid making the kinds of mistakes that have cost the Bucs wins in recent weeks.

He has been a proponent of his players executing and limiting mistakes on both sides of the football, but that just has not happened this season. Each week, there is a different name on the back of a jersey making a costly error.

On defense, poor tackles, busted coverages, missed sacks, and questionable personnel usage have all been to blame. On offense, it has been a case of missed connections on deep balls, a below-average running game outside of Rachaad White’s big day against the Colts, and penalties leading to big plays being called back.

Put all of this together, and it is not hard to see why the team has been trending downward.

“Silly Mistakes” Have Defined Todd Bowles-Led Bucs

Bucs ILB Devin White and Colts QB Gardner Minshew – Photo by: USA Today

Now it is understandable why Todd Bowles would not come flat-out and say that yes, the losses have been piling up. Doing so would be admitting he was wrong and would cast even more doubt on his abilities as a head coach.

But the results on most Sundays speak for themselves, and they have for a while. With a 29-game sample size to now go off, Bowles is 12-17 as the Bucs’ head coach, including the playoff loss to the Cowboys last season.

What has plagued Todd Bowles throughout his Tampa Bay coaching tenure have been “silly mistakes,” a phrase he used in his postgame press conference. That perfectly surmises many of the miscues that have kept the Bucs out of the win column.

“Well, we together as a unit, got to stop making silly mistakes,” Bowles said. “You know we can’t work any harder. We work hard as anybody in the league, if not more. We’ve seen things a thousand times at this point. The young guys can’t make the mistakes they make, and we got to make plays.”

Looking at how the team has played under Bowles, to win games it has taken a near-perfect effort by the defense and just enough by the offense to scrape by. The results have not been pretty, and there have rarely been convincing wins.

Circling back to the Bucs’ next game against the Panthers, they have every chance to get right against a team led by an interim head coach and sporting a 1-10 record. But can Tampa Bay be trusted at this point to avoid another defeat?

If they fail to come out on top, the losses will just continue to snowball downhill.

Whether Bowles admits it or not.