{"id":346220,"date":"2026-07-20T17:13:38","date_gmt":"2026-07-20T17:13:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/346220\/"},"modified":"2026-07-20T17:13:38","modified_gmt":"2026-07-20T17:13:38","slug":"tampa-bay-buccaneers-are-on-the-hunt-for-heart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/346220\/","title":{"rendered":"Tampa Bay Buccaneers are on the hunt for heart"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Getty Images<\/p>\n

Artificial intelligence is out of control. What\u2019s real? What\u2019s fake? Lines blur at supersonic speeds on social media. Horrifying to think about the simulated world we\u2019re passing off to our kids. And their kids. <\/p>\n

Until then, hey, let\u2019s enjoy all preposterous \u201cpress conferences\u201d that are obviously phony. You\u2019ve seen \u2018em on X, IG, Facebook. Players and coaches say things that are wildly out of character, and it\u2019s all so damn realistic. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Asked what he said to the team, a coach who says next to nothing dropped seven F-bombs in all. <\/p>\n

\u201cYou don\u2019t make excuses. You got to fucking care enough where the shit hurts. You\u2019ve got to fucking care enough to where this shit hurts. It\u2019s got to fucking mean something to you. It\u2019s more than a job. It\u2019s your fucking livelihood. How well do you know your job? How well can you do your job? You can\u2019t sugarcoat that shit. It was in-fucking-excusable. There\u2019s no fucking answer for it. There\u2019s no excuse for it. That\u2019s what you tell them in the locker room: Look in the fucking mirror.\u201d<\/p>\n

Did you, too, assume this clip<\/a> was AI in real time?<\/p>\n

It was not. <\/p>\n

Bowles was, in fact, fuming. Fed up. Doing anything he possibly could to jolt his 2025 Bucs to life.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat was the toned-down media version,\u201d this person says. \u201cHe\u2019s so even-keeled, which is one of the reasons we love him. Whether it\u2019s going great or going shitty, he\u2019s 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. \u2026 It\u2019s like, \u2018Why are we here? We shouldn\u2019t be here right now. We should be winning these games.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

That reaction inside the locker room? \u201cPretty quiet when your head man is fucking ripping asses everywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nobody pushed back because there was nothing to defend. Bowles was correct.<\/p>\n

The Buccaneers started 6-2 and deteriorated into an underachieving mess.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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<\/a> Mike Alstott in the A-gap.<\/p>\n

Miss our 2026 Quarterback Draft? Watch here.<\/a> Our Season Preview Features are underway? Here\u2019s how Aaron Brewer went from UDFA to All-Pro. <\/a><\/p>\n

Last year\u2019s 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\u2019ll tear it down now.<\/p>\n

Which makes for an interesting case study when you consider two teams that defeated them through their swoon \u2014 Miami, Atlanta \u2014 chose rebuilds.<\/p>\n

Tampa Bay attacked the offseason as if Bowles\u2019 rant was blaring full blast over the speakers. <\/p>\n

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\u2019ll \u201clook in the fucking mirror.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Getty Images Artificial intelligence is out of control. What\u2019s real? What\u2019s fake? Lines blur at supersonic speeds on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":346221,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[135,137,136],"class_list":["post-346220","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tampa","tag-tampa","tag-tampa-headlines","tag-tampa-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346220","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=346220"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346220\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/346221"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=346220"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=346220"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=346220"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}