Tampa Bay Buccaneers are on the hunt for heart
In FA, they added bite. In the draft, Rueben Bain Jr. fell into their lap. Baker Mayfield is healthy. A column on the NFC South team eyeing players who'll "look in the fucking mirror.”
Artificial intelligence is out of control. What’s real? What’s fake? Lines blur at supersonic speeds on social media. Horrifying to think about the simulated world we’re passing off to our kids. And their kids.
Until then, hey, let’s enjoy all preposterous “press conferences” that are obviously phony. You’ve seen ‘em on X, IG, Facebook. Players and coaches say things that are wildly out of character, and it’s all so damn realistic.
Like stone-cold-stoic Todd Bowles going ballistic after his Tampa Bay Buccaneers suffered a crushing loss to the Atlanta Falcons in December last season. Shortly after his team blew a 14-point fourth quarter lead with 10 minutes left, there was the head coach obviously edited to perfection.
Asked what he said to the team, a coach who says next to nothing dropped seven F-bombs in all.
“You don’t make excuses. You got to fucking care enough where the shit hurts. You’ve got to fucking care enough to where this shit hurts. It’s got to fucking mean something to you. It’s more than a job. It’s your fucking livelihood. How well do you know your job? How well can you do your job? You can’t sugarcoat that shit. It was in-fucking-excusable. There’s no fucking answer for it. There’s no excuse for it. That’s what you tell them in the locker room: Look in the fucking mirror.”
Did you, too, assume this clip was AI in real time?
It was not.
Bowles was, in fact, fuming. Fed up. Doing anything he possibly could to jolt his 2025 Bucs to life.
This summer, I asked one source with the Buccaneers about this moment. He assures Bowles was much, much, much more animated inside the locker room roughly 10 minutes before this interview.
“That was the toned-down media version,” this person says. “He’s so even-keeled, which is one of the reasons we love him. Whether it’s going great or going shitty, he’s able to keep it steady and not change too much. But we needed something. So he was trying everything he could at that point to get us out of that rut. … It’s like, ‘Why are we here? We shouldn’t be here right now. We should be winning these games.’”
That reaction inside the locker room? “Pretty quiet when your head man is fucking ripping asses everywhere.”
Nobody pushed back because there was nothing to defend. Bowles was correct.
The Buccaneers started 6-2 and deteriorated into an underachieving mess.
Baker Mayfield was patched together with Duct tape, glue and rusty nails by the end. The defense was a sieve. The No. 1 problem was this lack of heart. The Bucs were infested by too many players who treated football as a 9-to-5 nuisance. Not a livelihood. That’s how you lose games in such embarrassing fashion. One could argue that Bowles, a defensive coach, is part of that problem. Tampa Bay decided to stick with its coach and address this sore spot like a neck-rolled Mike Alstott in the A-gap.
Go Long is your home for longform.
Miss our 2026 Quarterback Draft? Watch here. Our Season Preview Features are underway? Here’s how Aaron Brewer went from UDFA to All-Pro.
Last year’s fall from 6-2 to 8-9 was cataclysmic. But the Buccaneers refused to tear it all down when Tom Brady finally retired for a life of Fox broadcasts, the Las Vegas Raiders and fake beefs with Logan Paul. No way they’ll tear it down now.
Which makes for an interesting case study when you consider two teams that defeated them through their swoon — Miami, Atlanta — chose rebuilds.
Tampa Bay attacked the offseason as if Bowles’ rant was blaring full blast over the speakers.
Is that enough to contend for a championship? Or is a reset overdue? From the top-down, this organization was hyper-motivated to find players who’ll “look in the fucking mirror.”
