National Football League

Bucs' Todd Bowles has silenced his critics: 'You're seeing the results'

Updated Jan. 18, 2024 10:04 a.m. ET

TAMPA, Fla. — It is 3:29 a.m., and Todd Bowles is late.

Raymond James Stadium sits empty across the street, unlit except for a spotlight on the "GO BUCS" sign in the north end zone and blinking red lights up high to warn planes landing nearby.

Entire minutes pass without another car driving by, but the security gate at the Bucs' facility is manned 24/7, in part because the team's coaches are nocturnal creatures of habit.

Some 15 hours earlier, Bowles had lamented that serving as defensive playcaller while still being head coach has meant longer days, starting early by any standards.

"It gets me in a lot earlier, I can tell you that much," Bowles said. "I used to be a 5:30 guy and I migrated to a 4:30 guy, and now I'm like a 3:20 guy. You get a lot of work done in the mornings. I still love that part of it. I still enjoy it very much. It's getting tiring. I'm getting old. I don't have that many years left in this league. I still enjoy it."

Asked how many years he might have left on the job, the 60-year-old Bowles laughed.

"I'm not going to make it to 70," he said. "I can tell you that right now. I guarantee you I'm not making 70."

Bowles is the rare man who is early even when he's late, and at 3:29 a.m. Thursday, his white SUV pulls off Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, through the gate and left into the players' lot. He backs into his spot and reports to work, trying to make the most of a short week before the Bucs' divisional round playoff game at Detroit on Sunday.

Twenty-four NFL teams have seen their seasons end, allowing coaches and players to snooze, with dreams of postseason magic all they have left. But the Bucs are somehow one of eight teams still alive, thanks to a commanding 32-9 wild-card win over the defending NFC champion Eagles on Monday night.

How far can the Bucs go in the playoffs?

This is a team — and a coach — that people slept on in 2023.

The oddsmakers in Las Vegas had set the over-under for Bucs wins at 6.5 — of 32 teams, only Arizona (4.5) had lower expectations. And yet national media outlets expected even less, with Sports Illustrated's NFL preview pegging Tampa Bay to go 4-13, USA Today predicting a 3-14 record, and NBC's Peter King slotting them No. 31 in his offseason power rankings.

In August, when odds were posted on the first NFL head coach to be fired, Bowles was a co-favorite at 6:1, the popular thinking being the team might move on if there was a disappointing start to the 2023 season. Tampa Bay opened 3-1, a surprise success story, but then hit an extended slump, losing six of seven games to fall to 4-7.

Bowles' future again looked to be in serious jeopardy.

The Bucs then rattled off four straight wins, needing only one victory in their final two games to claim a third straight NFC South title. A disappointing loss to the Saints left them at 8-8 headed into their regular-season finale against the worst team in the NFL, the Panthers. A loss would mean missing the playoffs and perhaps costing Bowles his job, but his defense came through one more time. Tampa recorded the franchise's first shutout in 13 years, a 9-0 win at Carolina to lock up a postseason spot.

Through all the ups and downs, Bowles' demeanor was remarkably steady, a metronome of even-keel patience setting the pace for his team's calm amid wild highs and lows.

"There is no doubt in my mind that Todd is a great coach," said Doug Williams, his Super Bowl teammate in Washington 36 years ago and the person who gave him his first coaching job, as defensive coordinator at Morehouse College in 1997. "He doesn't show a lot of enthusiasm, a lot of fire on the sidelines, but that's Todd Bowles. He's been like that since he was a player. There's no sense in changing his MO now. He's not going to do that. What you saw [against the Eagles in the wild-card game] was an artwork of a defense. To hold Philadelphia to nine points, that's pretty damn good."

Bowles has held a defending Super Bowl team to nine points before, with even more on the line. He was the Bucs' defensive coordinator under Bruce Arians three years ago when Tampa Bay dismantled Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs in a 31-9 Super Bowl victory for the franchise's second championship.

And when Arians retired in spring 2022, he turned the team over to Bowles — who he'd coached at Temple in the mid-1980s — handing him the reins for what would be Tom Brady's final season. The Bucs made the playoffs at 8-9, winning a bad division, but were routed by the Cowboys in the first round of the playoffs, 31-14.

Brady's retirement set the Bucs into salary-cap rehab this season, having borrowed heavily from future cap space to shoehorn as much talent around the quarterback to maximize his final playoff window. That resulted in a large amount of "dead money" — salary-cap space devoted to players no longer on the team — due to pro-rating bonuses into the future to save immediate cap room.

The Bucs had $79 million in dead cap in 2023 — $35 million from Brady alone — and another $11 million going to players lost to season-ending injuries before the first game. That's $90 million, a quarter of the NFL's $225 million salary cap, going to players not playing in 2023, essentially ripping off the band-aid and taking their lumps from a financial standpoint.

Their bargain-bin free agents panned out, especially quarterback Baker Mayfield, who was with three teams in 2022 and signed for a mere $4 million, a former No. 1 overall pick getting one more shot to reestablish himself as an NFL starter. Mayfield had the best year of his career, resetting his personal bests in touchdown passes (28) and passing yards (4,044), taking over Brady's team and finishing with a higher passer rating than an all-time legend had last season.

"We have a great locker room, great staff, just the leadership overall," Mayfield said after Monday's win. "We lean on each other. We trust each other. Just doing your job and knowing that the guy next to you is going to do his. That's accountability for yourself and for your teammates, and it's just amazing to see the growth this team has had in the second half of the year."

Has Baker Mayfield earned a long-term deal?

Bowles is the only head coach in Bucs history to make the playoffs in each of his first two seasons as head coach. The other 12 were a combined 3-for-23 in trying to make the postseason in those first two years. Part of the Bucs' improvements this season were changes Bowles made to his coaching staff, letting a few Arians assistants go and hiring longtime Seattle assistant Dave Canales, who has fared well as a first-year offensive coordinator and first-time playcaller. Bowles gave thanks Monday night to the assistants who have worked tirelessly with him to prepare the players to win.

"The coaching staff has been outstanding," he said. "Those are the same guys every day, you know? The same guys that we've been going to the playoffs the last four years with, and some new offensive guys that came in and jelled right away. Credit to them. The work that they put in every day, the teaching they constantly do over and over and over and staying with it and seeing the results of it, that's big. I'm proud of them."

As early as Bowles gets to the office, he's not the first to arrive. That honor goes to Bucs assistant Tom Moore, still coaching at 85 and routinely in the office by 2:30, setting the standard for everyone else. Moore enjoyed his 50th career NFL playoff game in Monday's win, and as the Bucs prepare for another in Detroit, Bowles cites his team's togetherness as a reason for optimism.

"You're going to go through adversity in the NFL. You're not going to go through unscathed," he said. "You're going to have to learn some lessons, you're going to have to get mentally tougher. And that comes with chemistry, the culture we created here, the chemistry they developed in training camp, mini-camp. And, as long as you go through the downs together, you come out of it together.

"The culture has been great with the players, the leaders have been great with the young guys, and we stayed the course. We … just kept tugging the chain, pulling forward, and you're seeing the results at the end."

Greg Auman is FOX Sports' NFC South reporter, covering the Buccaneers, Falcons, Panthers and Saints. He is in his 10th season covering the Bucs and the NFL full-time, having spent time at the Tampa Bay Times and The Athletic. You can follow him on Twitter at @gregauman.