It’s safe to say that things aren’t looking up for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
The team was lauded by fans and pundits after starting the season 3-1 and heading into the bye week with a dominant win over a division rival in the New Orleans Saints. Things haven’t gone its way since, though, as the team has lost six of its last seven matchups since then, and many fans and experts are pinning a large part of that on head coach Todd Bowles.
Following the team’s loss in Week 8, Bowles told media that the team wasn’t going to let the losses snowball. And when he was asked by media just why things have indeed snowballed, he both acknowledged shortcomings while seeming to imply that the team isn’t spiraling.
“I don’t think it’s snowballed,” Bowles said to media Monday. “I think we’re making mistakes at the wrong time. Whether we get down to the 1-yard line in the first quarter, or whether we blow something on defense in the second half – it’s a different guy every time.
“The effort is there, the work is there. 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.”
It’s safe to say Bowles is wrong about one thing — if losing six of your last seven games isn’t snowballing, it would be hard to pinpoint what is. But he is right about another, in that the team has made numerous mistakes across the board this year, and that includes the “small things” he mentioned to full-scale blowups at inopportune times. Those are things that need to be fixed, and while some would call that a disconnect between coaching and the players, Bowles doesn’t look at it that way.
“I don’t think it’s a disconnect,” he said. “I think it’s a concentration thing. They’ve done these things millions of times. It’s not like they don’t know how to do them. We’ve got to coach it better and we’ve definitely got to play it better.”
Bowles will have the chance to right some wrongs on Sunday when his team faces off against the once again coachless Carolina Panthers in Week 13 on Sunday at 4:05 p.m.
