Todd Bowles has won three division titles in three years at the Buccaneers head coach, but the path to the last two of them hasn't been as smooth as he would have liked.
The Buccaneers opened well each season, but found themselves at 4-7 in 2023 and 4-6 last season before finishing strong to secure the NFC South. The first question at Bowles's media availability at the league meetings on Tuesday concerned avoiding complacency and Bowles pointed to the midseason swoons as something that he will be focusing on when the team returns to work later this month.
"I feel good that we know how to win," Bowles said, via a transcript from the team. "I don't feel good about us finishing the season from a playoff aspect, and [in] the middle of the season, having a drought two years in a row. We've got to be better from that standpoint — from a coaching standpoint, from veterans holding everybody else accountable standpoint, which they do, but we've got to do a lot more of that. We've got to play not even better football at the end, but we've got to have killer instinct. We've got to try to blow people out and try to win the division instead of it going down to the last week."
Bowles said "more accountability" was the way to create the kind of killer instinct he's looking for and that he plans to talk to returning veterans to see what else they can pinpoint as a reason why they've had the recurring issues at midseason. It will take some time to see if the results of that work go well enough for Bowles to make it four straight crowns.
