Coordinators? We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Coordinators!

Hey, guess who got relieved of all playcalling responsibilities.

Saddled with the worst run defense in the NFL and a 1-9 record, coach Raheem Morris decided Monday night to relieve Jim Bates as defensive coordinator and take over the defensive play-calling duties.

Bates is going to stay with the team in a “consulting” role, but that just means that he’s going to remain a technical employee while standing around impotent and looking like less than a man. Bates’s defense this season has been nothing short of fucking awful and there’s no way he’s going to be contributing anything meaningful to whatever new defense will be introduced. But Morris is likely keeping him on the staff because to actually dismiss both of your coordinators IN SEASON means that you are the worst evaluator of personnel ever and should not be in charge of anything more important than the coffee maker.

Morris is expected to immediately return the Bucs to their Tampa 2 scheme, which will allow their undersized defensive linemen to take advantage of their quickness rather than penalize them for a lack of size.

This is no problem for Ronde Barber and Barrett Ruud and Chris Hovan where the Tampa 2 resides snugly in their DNA. But for Roy Miller, Kyle Moore, Geno Hayes, Dre Moore, Aqib Talib and any other defensive player who has been with the team less than two years, it’s going to be a pretty big adjustment. And these are the players who make up the youth movement that the team undertook when the season started. For the defense, this truly was a wasted year. Everything they learned, starting with the first minicamps in May up until now, is useless. Fuck.

I was on board with the Bates hire initially because I remember what he did in Miami and thought he had that same kind of old-guy passion for football that Monte Kiffin had. And let’s be fair. Bates is not instructing these guys to miss tackles, which is one of the big problems this season. But it has been apparent for weeks that whatever he is teaching isn’t working on the field. The team has been creeping back into Tampa 2 for the last several weeks, and Bates is not the man for that job.

Maybe this defense will finally have an identity again. At least now these next few weeks can be used to transition everyone back to Tampa 2 and use that as a jumping off point for next season. That is assuming Morris is still with the team next season. These two wasted hires really look bad for him, and the only thing you can point to that Morris can hang his hat on is recommending Josh Freeman as their first round pick this year. Winning a game or two or at least being competitive is going to be critical for Morris this season. When Freeman looked good right from the start, I thought that would be enough to save Morris’s job for another season. After this, I’m not so sure.