Todd Bowles - Head Coach, buccaneers Event: Press Conference | Date: 2026-09-20 | Full transcript (primary source).
Todd Bowles, Head Coach of the Buccaneers, addressed the media during a press conference on September 20, 2026, following a challenging start to the NFL season. The discussion focused on the team's struggles with penalties and missed tackles, emphasizing the need for immediate improvement as they prepare for upcoming games.
Transcript
Bowles: You've been very good at getting your team ready at the start of seasons. Why do they seem a little bit out of sync right now? Too many penalties offensively, too many missed tackles in the second half defensively, and nobody's coming to save us, and we've got to fix ourselves, and we've got to fix it in a hurry.
Bowles: What was your message to the team before heading out into the field and then after taking the last thing? Just talking about how we're getting down the field and going to score and how we had to defend. You have to go through the scenarios of winning a ball game and leaving time on the clock. It didn't come to that, but that was the message going out.
Bowles: And then your message to the team just now? What I just said, nobody's coming to save us. The penalties and the missed tackles, we've got to correct ourselves, and we've got to do it in a hurry. We've dealt with adversity before. This is an adverse situation again, first time at the beginning of the season. But we're going to right now, and we've got to pull ourselves up by our boots, and we've got to win.
Bowles: You know, you've got to have a fact of the clock in there as well, and you're not going to get it. You're just going putt, putt, putt, putt, putt, putt. So when we took a shot at some passes, it just didn't work out.
Bowles: Missed tackles. When we had our hands on them, we couldn't bring them down. And we had two guys collide and miss Boston, and he ran for a touchdown. So we got to tackle better.
Bowles: Something they were taking away. I got to look at the film and tell you for sure, but I know they doubled them a few times.
Bowles: I mean, they were doing the same thing. That's not an excuse. We were ready to play. We came out, we warmed up. We had 10, they had 10, so we got to go out and make plays.
Bowles: Can't commit the penalties. We got to have a better ground game early in the first half, and, you know, probably got to throw some quicker passes as well.
Bowles: Not at the same time as something that they were giving us on tape.
Bowles: Getting back there, we just faced a mobile quarterback, and he was elusive, stepping up in the pocket and moving some things. I thought we had a better pass rush than we had last week, still some things to work on, but, you know, we got to get going.
Bowles: We're dealing with adversity. We're going to come out, and we're going to correct our mistakes, and we got to get going.
