Coach Todd Bowles unpacked his fiery press conference speech after a stunning collapse, revealing frustration simmering over weeks of fundamental breakdowns.
The two main things people were talking about after the Tampa Bay Buccaneers' last game were the team's epic fourth-quarter collapse and Todd Bowles' response to it.
Tampa led a 4-9 Atlanta Falcons team by 14 in the fourth quarter, had a win probability above 92% with less than two minutes left and somehow lost the game.
Afterward, Bowles said what pretty much every Bucs fan was thinking, if not saying out loud.
"We don't make excuses," Bowles said. "We... you gotta *expletive* care enough to where the *expletive* hurts. You gotta *expletive* care enough to where the *expletive* hurts. It's gotta *expletive* mean something to you. It's more than a job. It's your *expletive* livelihood. How well do you know your job? How well can you do your job? We can't sugarcoat that *expletive.* It's in-*expletive*-excusable, and there no *expletive* answer for it. No excuse for it, and that's what you tell them in the locker room. Look in the *expletive* mirror."
On his weekly radio show "Bucs Total Access", Bowles explained that his reaction was a culmination of not just one bad night, but weeks of poor play.
“When you get beat on simple fundamentals and technique, that is something I really can’t stand or can’t take, and that’s the frustrating part of it,” Bowles said. “And not taking it out on one player or anybody else, but we know what we’ve been doing the past few weeks, and when those mistakes creep up at the end with the game on the line and we understand we gotta execute and we don’t do it — and we’ve done it 50 million times — that part really bothers you and really pisses you off.”
The Buccaneers were reeling before losing to Atlanta, and now, they are even worse.
At one point, Tampa was among the NFL's best teams, winning six of its first eight games.
Since then, Tampa has lost five of six, with an embarrassing home loss to the then-2- 10 New Orleans Saints taking place the week before the Atlanta debacle.
It would take a wild division for Tampa Bay to still be tied for first place amidst all of this, but such is life in the NFC South.
The only teams with a chance to win that division are Tampa (7-7) and the Carolina Panthers (7-7).
Through a scheduling anomaly, the teams face each other twice in the last three weeks of the regular season, with the first meeting scheduled for this Sunday at 1 in Charlotte.