Todd Bowles is the right coach at the right time for Tom Brady and the Buccaneers | Opinion
TAMPA — Easy does it. Maybe that’s the catchphrase Todd Bowles needs to have printed on his fresh business cards as the new Tampa Bay Buccaneers coach. Bowles is what you can call consistently mellow. Label him unassuming, low-keyed or chill and it would not offend him.
No, in replacing the gregarious, in-your-face, favorite uncle persona of Bruce Arians, the Bucs did not opt for a carbon copy. In Bowles, 58, you’d be hard-pressed sometimes to know what he’s really thinking, which makes him sneaky smooth, too.
“He’d be a great poker player if he gambled,” William Gholston, the 10th-year veteran defensive lineman, told USA TODAY Sports. “It’s comforting. There’re some situations in football that can turn either way.”
Like the blitz that Bowles called during the final half-minute of the NFC divisional playoff against the Los Angeles Rams in January. It backfired, allowing Matthew Stafford to connect with Cooper Kupp for a 44-yard completion that set up the game-winning field goal.
According to several Bucs, Bowles, then the defensive coordinator, didn’t even blow a gasket over that sequence, which extinguished hopes for a repeat Super Bowl crown.
“Nah, Coach Bowles is a real cool dude,” safety Antoine Winfield, Jr., told USA TODAY Sports, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him lose it.”
Perhaps that even-keeled approach begins to explain why Bowles could be the perfect coach for the right team at the right time.
Already, the Bucs' summer has come with perceived minefield moments. Tom Brady left training camp for 11 days to address a “personal issue” that fueled a torrent of speculation and Bowles didn’t flinch. The leader of an offensive line already thinned by offseason departures, center Ryan Jensen, went down early in camp with a severe knee injury that is projected to sideline him for months, and Bowles seemed to take it in stride.
And if the general pressure heaped on every head coach isn’t enough, Arians has buzzed around practice in a golf cart — just as he did as head coach, chatting with his former players and coaches — to embody a long shadow. Bowles just shrugged at that.
After all, Arians is Bowles’ mentor. Their relationship dates to Bowles playing for Arians at Temple. Arians, who contributed to the decision by team owners Malcolm and Joel Glazer, with GM Jason Licht, to promote Bowles as the successor, is still in the mix as a senior football consultant.
“Bruce has been a great coach; he gave me a great opportunity,” Bowles told USA TODAY Sports, sitting inside the indoor training facility during the early stages of camp. “He comes out because he still likes to come out, but I coach this team.
“We talk all the time because we always have. That’s natural. But I coach the team my way. I put my stamp on it by the way I coach. And I can only be me.”
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The Bucs, who open the season in prime time at the Dallas Cowboys on Sept. 11, will benefit from the stability that comes with this transition. Bowles was the Bucs’ D-coordinator the previous three years and the bulk of the coaching staff, including O-coordinator Byron Leftwich, quarterbacks coach Clyde Christensen and assistant head coach Harold Goodwin, remained.
“I’ve been here three years, so I kind of had the pulse of a lot of guys and I’ve seen it from different angles,” Bowles said. “Right now, I trying to tweak things. Keep the things that we did great, tweak the things we can do better. That’s my job, on a daily basis. Anything else, I don’t even worry about it.”
Bowles insists that he never grew frustrated while passed over for several head coaching jobs across the NFL in recent years, which inexplicably cast him as an example for the challenges of minority coaches. Even as the Bucs rolled to a Super Bowl 55 crown, Bowles, like Leftwich, wasn’t interviewed for a single head coaching job. Given NFL trends, it seemed possible that Bowles, who spent four seasons as New York Jets head coach, might never get another opportunity.
“I didn’t get discouraged, because that’s not why I got in it,” he said. “I got in it to help guys in any way possible, whether that’s with a small group of DBs, to half the group as the defensive coordinator, to the entire team. You get in it to coach players.”
He wound up catching quite a break. The Bucs are again equipped as a legitimate Super Bowl contender. And what coach wouldn’t want Brady as the field general.
The setup is reminiscent of what Jim Caldwell stepped into upon succeeding Tony Dungy as the Indianapolis Colts coach in 2009. Caldwell was already in house as the quarterbacks coach and assistant head coach. And Peyton Manning was his quarterback.
“I also think, personality-wise, at least in the public persona, Todd is very similar to Jim,” Bill Polian, the former Colts GM, told USA TODAY Sports. “They are low-keyed and straight forward.”
Polian can certainly relate to the Bucs’ decision to promote Bowles. Caldwell was pegged internally as Dungy’s successor long before it occurred. In Caldwell’s first season, the Colts posted a 14-2 regular-season mark and advanced to Super Bowl 44.
“It’s a question of the right guy being in the right place,” Polian said. “And he has the advantage of knowing the organization, the culture, the players and the division. The only thing that’s different is that he has a different office. There’s no learning curve. That’s a huge advantage.”
What a contrast to Bowles’ first head coaching shot with the Jets in 2015, a rebuilding job that fizzled. After taking over a 4-12 team, Bowles led the Jets to a 10-6 mark as a rookie coach, then with three quarterbacks in four years, never had another winning season as his overall record sputtered to 24-40.
And, hey, no longer must he face Brady twice a year as an AFC East rival.
“At one point with the Jets — I think I was going into my third year — I was the longest-tenured coach in New York,” said Bowles, who grew up in Elizabeth, New Jersey. “Baseball. Basketball. Soccer. Hockey. You name it. That tells you a lot right there. It wasn’t pressure, because I’m from up there. I learned more up there to help my coaching career than any stop I had. What I went through in those four years, you can’t get that kind of experience.”
The biggest lesson?
“For me, it was more or less don’t get entangled by all the minor things,” he said. “You can’t be worried about somebody being five minutes late when somebody’s got a drug problem over here or somebody’s in a car accident. And you handle them on a case-by-case basis.”
Of course, in the new role, all eyes were cast on Bowles as his iconic quarterback took an unprecedented — and unexplained — break from training camp. Second-guessing swirled when Bowles told reporters that the team knew about Brady’s hiatus in advance — but didn’t disclose it publicly until the quarterback was absent. For days, Bowles was pressed about that and for specifics about Brady’s return.
At one point, Bowles said, “Do I look worried?”
That was a loaded reply from a man who never looks worried.
Although the intrigue surrounding Brady’s absence remains, his sharpness upon his return suggests that he is back on track.
“If it wasn’t a situation that we hadn’t talked about, if it wasn’t important, I wouldn’t have done it,” Bowles told reporters last week. “So, obviously, I have that kind of relationship, as well do the (other Bucs) coaches with a lot of the players and they all have private things that they come to us with.
“We don’t give breaks just to take breaks.”
As he reflected on his journey early in camp — Bowles has worked with eight NFL teams and two HBCU schools, Morehouse and Grambling, since finishing his eight-year career as an NFL safety in 1994 — he pointed to the need for a mind open to change as a key to longevity.
So, too, is composure, with more tests always right around the corner.
“There’s probably adversity every day,” Bowles said. “It’s different here because I’ve been here three years. I know how everyone’s going to react through certain things.”
Even better, they know how the head man in charge will react.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Tom Brady, Tampa Bay Buccaneers in good hands with Todd Bowles
