It was a disappointing 2017 NFL season for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, to say the least. After an offseason filled with moves to help boost the offense, Tampa Bay largely stumbled to their 5-11 finish.
As a result, head coach Dirk Koetter had landed in the hot seat before the Buccaneers ultimately decided to give him and the rest of the coaching staff another year to figure things out. According to Rick Stroud of the Tampa Bay Times, general manager Jason Licht stands by that decision and acknowledged that the team still has some personnel issues to deal with in the offseason:
“We’ve been pretty heavy offense,” Licht said. “It’s the way things fell. We wanted to surround our quarterback with good players. Now it’s a little bit more of a challenging phase right now to concentrate on trying to build that defense up.
“The last eight games – this is typically what you get from teams that didn’t make the playoffs – we were close in this many games and we should’ve won these games and blah, blah, blah. But as bad as everybody wants to say the defense was, we did have moments. At this point last year, we were being lauded for the best off-season move of keeping Mike Smith after a historic turnaround in 2016. And now we had a year where I’ve been on record saying it – it was brutal. But you know, you don’t just forget how to coach. You know, in the past the team has been criticized for making changes too fast. For wiping the slate clean and starting over. In this day and age, it’s understandable that people seem to want instant change.
“We feel like it’s continuity, after a deep dive here in the off-season of what the issues were, we know what they were we all think we can get better. We know we can get better. Nobody is working harder than these guys in this building right now on both sides. The answers are here in terms of the coaches, the personnel people and we have a lot of good players we feel like in this locker room that can turn this thing around.”
Many teams would have cut ties with their head coach after a season in which the team fell vastly short of expectations. However, it seems Jason Licht is looking to bring some stability to this promising Buccaneers squad moving forward.
Tampa Bay had been quick to axe its head coaches in recent years after firing Greg Schiano and Lovie Smith in a span of three years before promoting Koetter. That said, he will get another shot to lead this team back to relevancy in the NFC Conference next season.
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