NFC Notes: Dennis Allen, Todd Bowles, Frank Reich, Buccaneers, Panthers, Saints

Buccaneers

Buccaneers HC Todd Bowles says the team isn’t in a tailspin despite losing six of their last seven games.

“I don’t think it’s snowballed,” Bowles said to media, via BucsWire.com. “I think we’re making mistakes at the wrong time. Whether we get down to the 1-yard line in the first quarter, or whether we blow something on defense in the second half – it’s a different guy every time. The effort is there, the work is there. You want to win a ballgame – we’re desperate to win a ballgame, just one ballgame – but small things happen against different teams at different times. We can’t play the Bucs plus the opposition.”

“I don’t think it’s a disconnect,” Bowles concluded. “I think it’s a concentration thing. They’ve done these things millions of times. It’s not like they don’t know how to do them. We’ve got to coach it better and we’ve definitely got to play it better.”

Panthers

Albert Breer of Sports Illustrated points out that Panthers’ owner David Tepper notoriously has a short leash with coaches after firing Frank Reich, given the organization has deployed an interim coach for 22 percent of Tepper’s games in charge. Breer cites a former Carolina staffer who thinks Tepper’s background as a hedge fund manager means he’s willing to quickly pull the plug on staff members. 

“His thing is, the minute it gets bad, it’s going to get worse, so we better try something else,” said the former staffer. “He’s a hedge fund guy; that’s what hedge fund guys do. The second something stops earning money, they take their money out of it, take the profit and move on to something else.”

Breer cites a former Panthers’ coach who believes Tepper views coaches like stocks.

“He doesn’t care about the money,” said the former coach. “He looks at it like a stock—you make a poor investment, there’s a sunk cost, boom, you move on.”

Breer cites another Carolina coach who feels costly errors on third- and fourth-downs were too much for Reich to overcome. 

“I knew Frank was done. Those are the things [Tepper] knows. He knows you can’t do that. Some of those high-percentage third- and fourth-down decisions, you can’t f— those up. He will be mad. And it’s not that you can’t go against the numbers, that’s how he made his money. It’s when they’re clear absolutes, like punting on a clear go or wasting a timeout, and then you can’t get the ball back. It’s the unforced errors.”

Saints

Saints HC Dennis Allen knows that his team needs to turn things around after seeing mistakes against the Falcons that he deemed frustrating and unacceptable. 

“I think it is critically urgent,” Allen said, via Pro Football Talk. “I think the message to the team was ‘That’s unacceptable, we’ve got to be better.’ But just because we stand up here and we’re able to talk in a tone and in a way that doesn’t necessarily say that we understand the sense of urgency, I can certainly appreciate the question and I can appreciate the fans’ urgency and I can assure you that the people inside the building feel the same sense of urgency. It was frustrating that we weren’t able to capitalize on the opportunities we had. That was frustrating. . . . We’ve got to coach better and we’ve got to play better.”

• According to Aaron Wilson, the Saints worked out five kickers including Ramiz Ahmed, Taylor Bertolet, Mason Crosby, James McCourt, and Austin Seibert.
• Of this group, New Orleans signed Seibert to their practice squad.