Last April, Bruce Arians executed what was supposed to have been a smooth handoff of the head-coaching baton to Todd Bowles.
The baton ended up bouncing around on the track.
In the aftermath of a sub-.500 season that wouldn’t have resulted in a playoff berth if the Buccaneers weren’t assigned to the worst division in football, Arians explained what went sufficiently wrong to result in offensive coordinator Byron Leftwich getting fired.
“It was very hard for me,” Arians told Rich Eisen recently, via JoeBucsFan.com. “But it’s Todd’s football team. I handed it to Todd for a reason. He’s got to build it in his image. There’s no hard feelings between the two guys; the philosophies just didn’t match. . . . I got all the trust in the world in Todd Bowles, but I feel terrible for Bryon. I think Byron will still be a head coach soon and he should be.”
For now, Leftwich isn’t even an assistant coach. He went from the brink of being hired by the Jaguars in early 2022 to being in football limbo for 2023. He wasn’t interviewed for a single head-coaching job in the current cycle.
It’s odd that Arians, who worked very closely with both Bowles and Leftwich, wouldn’t have known that they had different philosophies. Arians should have known. It shouldn’t have been a surprise to Arians.
Maybe it wasn’t. Again, all of this assumes that Arians truly decided on his own to walk away, 17 days after Tom Brady ended his 40-day retirement. Some believe it wasn’t all that voluntary, and that the notion of selling it as a smooth transition was better than creating the impression that Brady wanted the change as a condition of returning.
If anything, that fact that the philosophies didn’t match and that Arians knew or should have known this strengthens the idea that it wasn’t as voluntary as they tried to make us think it was, and that it was driven by the notion that the post-Arians approach would be Bowles running the defense and the team on game days, and Leftwich and Brady running the offense.
If it had worked better, maybe Leftwich would have gotten a chance to work with Brady’s successor. But because it failed miserably last year (relative to expectations), it was time for Bowles to make a change.
Whether that change will be enough to get Bowles a third season remains to be seen.