Todd Bowles Seems To Think Strong Start To 2025 Was A Bit Of A Mirage
February 25th, 2026
Strange response.
There is hardly a day that goes by that Joe doesn’t think of how the Bucs beat Seattle in the Pacific Northwest last season.
The Seahawks, who went on to win the Super Bowl, had maybe the best defense in the league. And the Bucs, without Mike Evans, without Bucky Irving, without Cody Mauch and Luke Goedeke and with a hobbled Chris Godwin, who couldn’t finish the game with an injury, hung 38 points on Seattle.
That turned out to be the high-water mark for the Bucs’ season. They were never the same team after that, eventually losing seven of their final nine games and missing the playoffs for the first time this decade.
So with Bucs coach Todd Bowles speaking to the local pen and mic club at the Indiana Convention Center for the first time since his season-ending postmortem a day after the Bucs were eliminated on the final day of the regular season, Joe figured Bowles had ample time to watch tape and give Joe a reason for the collapse.
Joe mentioned to Bowles how the Bucs were one of, if not the hottest team in the NFL. Bowles basically told Joe to slow down. The Bucs were not playing that well, despite being in the running for the No. 1 seed in the NFC playoffs.
“We didn’t execute,” Bowles told Joe. “Even at the beginning of the season when we went 6-2, they were some hard-fought ballgames. It was not like we were blowing people out.
“We were kind of winning because we were doing the right things at the end of the ballgame. And I don’t think we did the right things in the second half [of the season] at the end of ballgames. Whether that was special teams, defense or offense, from a coaching standpoint and a playing standpoint we just have to be better than that.”
This was a weird response from Bowles. Was he trying to say the Bucs were just lucky? That the team wasn’t playing well but got the right bounce of the football?
The Bucs hung with the Eagles (special teams did the Bucs in that day), won at Houston, riddled Seattle for 38 points, beat San Francisco.
That’s what good teams do: Beat good teams. But to hear Bowles, the Bucs were winning with mirrors until the mirror cracked. Strange.
February 25th, 2026 at 5:32 am
Is anyone surprised? I’ll be so glad when we move on from him.
February 25th, 2026 at 5:53 am
Todd mirage bowles he keeps telling everyone he is bad but glazers won’t listen it’s a bucs life.
February 25th, 2026 at 6:12 am
Bowles isn’t a coach. He is just a spectator like many here. A coach makes adjustments during a game to help his team. He isn’t going to suddenly become something he isn’t. Hard to believe the Glazer’s allow this to continue for another year.
February 25th, 2026 at 6:15 am
When your own head coach calls a fast start a “mirage,” he’s not offering insight, he’s confessing he never understood why it happened. If it was fool’s gold, that’s on Todd Bowles for failing to build on it; if it was real, it’s on him for letting it evaporate. Either way, it’s not analysis, it’s an indictment of his leadership.
February 25th, 2026 at 6:18 am
Seems to me that he was saying that the Bucs didn’t play well the entire season and that they only won all of those games at the beginning because they somehow became super focused in the 4th quarter, eliminating the mistakes they had made early in those games and something they were not able to do the rest of the season.
In other words, he is saying that the second third of the season Bucs were the real Bucs.