Bowles believes the Buccaneers are neither a collapse nor a Super Bowl contender, but a "very good football team" poised for division dominance.
For Tampa Bay Buccaneers head coach Todd Bowles, the team isn’t as a good as it’s 6-2 start last season, but isn’t as bad as its 2-7 finish.
Attending the annual NFL owners meetings in Phoenix, Arizona, Bowles was asked Tuesday about general manager Jason Licht’s recent assessment that the team is the same as the one that started hot in 2025, rather than the one that collapsed.
In an interview with Pewter Report, Bowles said the team is as good as its start, which included scoring 38 points and beating the eventual Super Bowl champion Seahawks in Seattle and then, the next week, scoring 30 points and beating the playoff-bound San Francisco 49ers in Tampa.
But he doesn’t think the Buccaneers are as bad as they looked in losing four straight games to squads with losing records in December.
"I think you start over, and I think you have to lay the groundwork again and build differently, because you lost two of your best leaders (Mike Evans and LaVonte David) on and off the field," Bowles said. "So, we have to build differently, our mentality's got to be different, and there's got to be different people to step up.
"I do feel like we have a very good football team."
That could be enough to reclaim the NFC South.
No team in the division finished with a winning record, and the Bucs, at 8-9, lost the division to the Carolina Panthers in a tiebreaker.
To be “top flight,” the Bucs will need to be better offensively (16th in scoring last year).
Bowles expressed confidence in the team’s receiving group even without Evans, who signed a three-year, $60 million deal with the 49ers earlier this month, thus ending a 12-year run with the Bucs in which he became the team’s all-time leading receiver.
Another change within the offense is something that the Bucs made by choice.
Josh Grizzard went into last season as a first-year offensive coordinator. He was fired after the season.
Running the Bucs' offense now is Zac Robinson, who signed on in Tampa with two years as the Atlanta Falcons' offensive coordinator.
This is a change from what Bowles has done in the past.
In 2023, Bowles hired Dave Canales, who had never been an OC, to do the job.
When Canales left to become the Panthers’ head coach, Bowles hired Liam Coen, who also had not yet served as an offensive coordinator in the NFL.
“We wanted a little more (experience), and we played Atlanta the last two years, so Zac has kind of been auditioning for it, so to speak,” Bowles told reporters at the NFL combine in Indianapolis last month.
Bowles said Robinson reminded him of Coen, who led the Bucs to the fourth-highest scoring offense in the league two years ago.
"From a gameplan standpoint and an execution standpoint, but he’s his own person," Bowles said. "We’re not running the same thing, so to speak, but his personality and style, the way he likes to do things, and the way our guys can fit his scheme, I thought was the best among everybody we interviewed."
Defensively, Bowles admitted in Phoenix that losing David, who had been with the team for 14 years, "stung."
Another loss that the Bucs suffered over the offseason was cornerback Jamel Dean, who signed a three-year, $36.75 million deal with the Pittsburgh Steelers, thus ending a seven-year run with the Bucs.
"We definitely need another cornerback," Bowles told Pewter Report on Tuesday. "Whether it's a veteran or whether it's a draftable pick remains to be seen, and we'll kind of go from there. But we like to add one or two to the mix."
Licht recently talked about the draft in an interview with the team's media staffers on Buccaneers.com, saying he feels the talent in this draft matches up with what the team needs.
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