The Tampa Bay Buccaneers defeated the Atlanta Falcons 29-25 to take sole possession of first place in the NFC South. But it wasn’t pretty by any means.
Here’s a list of the coaching blunders committed by the Buccaneers’ coaching staff Sunday afternoon:
- The play calling of run-run-pass that led to less than 10 yards gained on five out of six possessions.
- The two timeouts burned in the second half because you couldn’t get the right special teams personnel out and a bad challenge.
- The fact that the Bucs only had nine players on the field on the TD run by Bijan Robinson.
- The fourth-and-two play call where they toss the ball five yards behind the line of scrimmage.
- The inability to get Mike Evans and Chris Godwin involved in the offense.
- Blown coverage after blown coverage, which has occurred all season. If you haven’t fixed it by this point, you can no longer blame the personnel for your inability to push across your coverage schemes.
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You’d look at this list, which is truly a microcosm of the bigger problems that this Bucs team has had all year, and would think it would be grounds for termination of head coach Todd Bowles.
I mean, this was it. This was the game for all the marbles. With a loss, the Bucs’ playoff chances drop to 8%. With a win they rise to 52%.
And this is the performance this coaching staff submitted? These are the decisions they made in crunch time?
These are guys making millions of dollars to make decisions on national television? No. That can’t be. Not for a “multi-time Super Bowl winning franchise.”
And yet, the Bucs managed to escape with a 29-25 victory over the Falcons because Atlanta is really, really bad.
So now, the Bucs are in possession of first place in the NFC South. They control their destiny when it comes to this division. They won’t have to check the scoreboard and worry about what other teams are doing, as long as they take care of business, they’ll be able to take their fat Wild Card game L against whoever doesn’t win the NFC East.
And Todd Bowles can say “Hey, I can’t be fired, I won three straight division titles for this team, which has never been done before!”
Or maybe the Bucs have a few more epic collapses in them to finish out the year and they’ll blow it.
Regardless, it’s a Bucs life, but fire those cannons, because the Bucs sucked less than an NFC South opponent for a consecutive week.
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This article originally appeared on CLTAMPA.COM and is used with permission.
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