TAMPA—Bruce Arians saw the practice with his own eyes and he’s known the new Buccaneers coach, his successor, since the guy was a teenager. So adding a team that was dragging for a couple hours to the Todd Bowles he knows, and the 69-year-old had a pretty good idea of what was coming..
But the coworker standing next to Arians as Bowles called the team up sure didn’t. A few minutes later, she was stunned, and even a little amused.
“I didn’t think I’d hear that much cussing anymore since you left,” she joked to Arians.
“Oh, yeah, he’s got it in him,” Arians responded. “I promise.”
These are now Bowles’s Buccaneers—and the people who are a part of it think the timing of his arrival, contrary to popular belief, couldn’t be better.
For Arians, things playing out this way allowed for him to hand a championship-ready team to a man he says is “like a second son to me.” For Bowles’ coaches, it’s a chance to keep building on what they’ve already established, knowing the plan is for the head man to be around a while. For the players, it’s a new voice, and one that can give them a different
perspective than Arians did, while maintaining all the good the old man established.
And for Bowles himself? This is the chance to reestablish what he’s always thought he was capable of being as a head coach after a short-circuited stint with the Jets ended three-and-a-half years ago. It’s also an opportunity to show who he is, which has forever been a little different than the stoic, stern-looking guy you’ve seen on your TV screen.
Who he is was on display in that scene Arians described from earlier in camp, all the same as it was the day I showed up, which happened to be another one carrying triple-digit heat indexes into a two-hour practice window. The difference, on this day, was that rather than beat his team down again, he chose to pulled back the reins, and pulled them into the fieldhouse for a brisk, climate-controlled 90 minutes of work..
“Common sense is important, because I know how much we need these guys during the year,” Bowles said in a quiet moment after practice under the shield of a tent. “And that subtle part of it, just being an ex-player, you can see who does what, when they’re tired, when they’re not. I’m a very good observational guy—Bruce has told me that. My thing is, what can we do better? Not to take away the things we were doing great, but to add on to it, to tweak some things to what we can do better, because we didn’t win the whole thing.”
That’s the other thing. Few first-year coaches come out of the gate talking about winning “the whole thing.” Bowles isn’t afraid to. He knows where his team is, what it’s capable of and what he’s capable of, too.
Which is another reason to think he might just be the right guy at the right time for the Buccaneers.
