David will decide in the coming months if he’s going to extend his career to a 15th season, and there are some pending free agents in the likes of Dean, Haason Reddick and Logan Hall, but the Bucs should be able to return a reasonably strong core of defensive players in 2026. Bowles also said on Monday that he thought the Bucs had “enough talent to win” in 2025, and while that was in regards to the roster as a whole it surely included the defense, specifically. One area that the Bucs went into last offseason believing they needed help but did not in the end find improvement was in the pass rush. Tampa Bay’s final total of 37 sacks on defense was its lowest since 2017. In Bowles’ first six seasons with the team, including three as defensive coordinator and three as head coach, the Bucs averaged just under 47 sacks per campaign.
“I thought it was a tough year, defensively,” said Bowles. “It starts with me, because I’m the [defensive] coordinator, as well, and the coaching staff, but we’ve got to rush better and we’ve got to cover better. It works together. Sometimes the rush got there and the coverage wasn’t there. Sometimes the coverage was there and the rush didn’t get there. It’s not about the sacks – it’s more, for us, about the pressure and making the quarterback get rid of the ball and be incomplete. I don’t think we did that consistently.”
The Buccaneers own the 15th, 46th and 77th picks in this year’s draft, and they rank 17th in the NFL in available cap space for free agency, according to Spotrac. There may be opportunities to add defensive talent, perhaps specifically to get after the quarterback more consistently. But the first order of business for Bowles is to evaluate why the Bucs’ defense had a tough year in 2025 and exactly what changes need to be made.
“We’ve got to take a deep evaluation, starting with myself,” said Bowles. “Once I do that, I’ll evaluate the coaches and players and we’ll go accordingly. … It takes a while. It’s not a day[-long] process. It’s not a daily process. It’s going to take a couple of weeks to unravel everything. It starts with me – once I get that together and go through things I can do better, and I can do better for the team and I can lead better. Then you check with the coaches and you try to figure out what we can do better as a staff and then we try to figure out what we can do better as players and put them in better positions and what we need and what we need to build on. It’ll be an ongoing process.
“You start breaking down decisions and things you want to do better, things you think you could do better and things that can help and go forward and see what type of team we have, what type of team we want. Are we coaching it the right way? Are they playing it the right way? It’s an ongoing evaluation process. It’s going to take weeks.”
