Can the Bucs turn their season around?
These next 8 games will determine wether or not the Koetter/Licht regime will continue for the 2019 season in Tampa Bay. Or will the Glazers will choose to blow the whole thing up and start over?
The Bucs are 3-5 at the halfway point and what started off with a lot of promise and excitement has turned to doom and gloom as the Bucs are a team with more shortcomings than we thought.
They can’t run the ball with any consistency. The defense is on pace to be the worst in the 98 year history of the NFL. Think about that. there has never been a defense that is this bad ever. That alone should tell you how bad this defense has been. The defense is on pace to give up 553 points.
The overall fundamentals are terrible. Week after week we listen to the coaches blovaiate throughout the week on the same issues, we didn’t tackle, we didn’t cover, we didn’t block very well, we were out of position, there was no pursuit, thats why we didn’t perform better. At some point if the coaches are doing what they are paid to do you would think these issues would gradually go away and be non issues.
Koetter has gone on record as saying that he doesn’t know how to fix some of the issues on this team or the issues would be fixed. Imagine your boss at work asking you to fix a certain issue and you telling your boss you have no idea what to do or how to fix It. How lono would you stay employed?
The kicking game has not been great. Although it has not directly led to a loss because of a misled FG or EXP, the Bucs have to find a reliable kicker somewhere. If not for making a 59 yard FG to win the game against the Browns, we would already have a new kicker in Tampa.
The Bucs have 3 winnable games coming up and it starts this Sunday at home against Washington. Although the redskins are 5-3 and in first in NFC East, this team has a ton of injuries at key positions and this game is one that the Bucs need to win.
After the Redskins, the next two games are against the New York Giants on the road, and then back home to the play San Francisco with the great NIck Mullens at QB. These are all winnable games and the Bucs should win all three in spite of the defense.
This would put the Bucs at 6-5 heading into the stretch run and anything can happen at that point.
I think the Bucs need 10 wins for the Glazers to bring Koetter and Licht back. I don’t think the playoffs are a necessity for these two to keep their jobs, but the Bucs do have to show lots of improvement in the second half of the season.
In The Dirk Koetter era, the Bucs have never been better than 3-5 at the mid point of the season. Their best finish with Koetter was in 2016 as the Bucs went 6-2 to finish 9-7 just missing the playoffs.
Offensively, the talent is there to put a win streak together like we witnessed in 2016. But this defense has a lot to improve on to make believers out of you and me that a run like we saw in 2016 is possible.
