While many around the league assumed Lovie Smith would be back with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers next season, especially since the team improved its record over last season by four games, the team’s owners obviously felt different. As a result, Smith was fired after a 6-10 season.
Losing the last four games did not help Smith’s case, and the absolute beatdown suffered at the hands of the Carolina Panthers, while understandable, probably exacerbated the situation.
Of course, many were quick to defend Smith and pointed to the fact that the Bucs had their best offensive season in the team’s history last season, and many also highlighted the growth of Jameis Winston. The key issue, however, is that much of the team’s success on offense has been attributed to quarterback guru Dirk Koetter, while the team’s disastrous play on defense has been credited to Smith.
All of this makes sense as Smith called the plays on defense, and that side of the ball is his speciality, but it’s not that simple. Yes, the players Smith brought in, the ones that were “his guys” and fit his scheme perfectly -- we’ll get to that later -- did not perform, but who is to blame for that? Tim Jennings was a disaster, big free agent acquisition Alterraun Verner also underperformed, cornerback Mike Jenkins was awful, and safety Chris Conte was mediocre at best. At some point, though, you have to draw the line and say that the performances of these players is not all on Lovie Smith. At the end of the day, Smith wanted guys that fit his defensive philosophy, i.e. a Cover-2 heavy scheme, but these guys turned out to just not be very good football players. It doesn’t make sense to put that all on Smith, but at the end of the day, he is the one that wanted these players, and it’s his scheme, and his play-calling, so naturally, it does come back to Smith.
Smith took over the play-calling duties in an effort to improve the play on that side of the ball. The Bucs consistently made the most average of quarterbacks look like first ballot Hall of Famers, and the words “pass rush” were probably never spoken of at One Buc Place. As aforementioned, the players did underperform, for the most part, but the big issue is with Smith’s Tampa-2 defensive philosophy. Smith’s defensive scheme, in today’s NFL is simply outdated and it’s been exposed many, many times over the past couple of seasons. It’s no coincidence that both the Bucs and Dallas Cowboys, who have a similar defensive scheme, were atrocious in the secondary.
In this example, the Bucs are showing a cover-2 man defensive set, with the two deep safeties and man coverage underneath. The problem in this situation is that the defensive end is matched up man-to-man with the tight end, which will rarely end well. This happened so often throughout the season, where the Bucs would have been better off in a zone coverage, and many other teams such as the Seattle Seahawks are having great success with plenty of zone coverage. Meanwhile, the Bucs stuck to their cover-2 man at all of the wrong times, especially when their four man rush was not generating any sort of pressure.
Smith’s defense is not just “Tampa-2,” however. The Bucs used a lot of single-high safety looks and a lot of three deep looks, but still something was just not clicking.
Here, the Bucs were in cover-3, but the weakness of this defensive look, the weakside curl route, was exposed by the Chicago Bears. The coverage is pretty decent overall, but the linebacker is late, which also happened a lot this season.
You can probably already see where this is going. While on the one hand the Bucs had scheme issues on defense, the players were also lacking technique and underperforming. The reason why I’m leaning more towards scheme issues, is that on tape, it was clear that the Cowboys had a lot of the same problems.
The truth is that it’s probably a combination of the players on the defensive side just playing poorly and Lovie Smith’s defensive philosophy just being exposed once again.
The question now becomes whether the Bucs, now under defensive coordinator Mike Smith, who runs a very simple 4-3 defense, will improve or regress. But whatever happens next season, might shed some more light on went exactly went wrong for Lovie Smith and his Bucs defense.