Todd Bowles might or might not be in his last season as the Tampa Bay Buccaneers' head coach.
Of Tampa's last 14 games, the Bucs have won just three. For a team that started the decade with four divisional title wins (and a Super Bowl win in the one year they didn't take the NFC South), that's well below the standard.
But a key part of the Buccaneers' defense, of which Bowles is the coordinator, credited Bowles with keeping the team motivated.
One of the many drawbacks of starting 0-4 is that it's possible that a team just checks out and starts thinking about the next season, or in the case of some players, the next team.
If that's happened to this year's Bucs team, it didn't show last Thursday night in Dallas, when the Bucs beat the Cowboys in Big D for their first win.
For Alex Anzalone, a veteran in his first season with the Bucs, this is a tribute to the head coach.
“I think that he just did a really good job this last week because you know there’s a lot of outside noise,” Anzalone told reporters this week. “You can fall into that trap of listening to that poison and [it can] kind of bring you down. Or, like [you begin to think], ‘Hey man, maybe we really aren’t that good.’ But [Bowles] did a good job of just kind of changing the mindset of the team and truly understanding this is a long season.”
It is a long season, but at the same time, the Bucs don't have much time.
Only one team in league history has started 0-4 and gone on to make the playoffs, and that was the 1992 San Diego Chargers.
The good news for the Bucs is that the rest of the NFC South isn't doing so hot, either.
The first-place Carolina Panthers are just 2-2, and the Atlanta Falcons (2-3) and New Orleans Saints (1-4) are doing just marginally better than the Bucs, if any better at all.
Anzalone also brought home a point that Bowles made after the Dallas win: The season can be broken up into four quarters, four games each.
This analogy doesn't have the perfect symmetry that it once did due to the NFL switching from 16 games to 17, but it still works.
Tampa clearly lost the first quarter of the year, losing its first four games. Quarter No.2 got off to a good start, and now, it must continue, with every game having a playoff feel.
The Bucs played the middle game of the second quarter Sunday at 1 against the Pittsburgh Steelers at home.
After that, the Bucs begin NFC South play against the Panthers in Carolina, then end the second quarter against the Falcons in Tampa.
The Bucs started 6-2 last year before crashing. A reversal of last year is what the team needs to make the playoffs.