Some members of the NFL neighborhood spent the opening half of this week criticizing Tampa Bay Buccaneers head coach Todd Bowles after star extensive receiver Chris Godwin suffered a grotesque dislocated left ankle whereas enjoying late in what turned the membership’s 41-31 loss to the Baltimore Ravens on Monday night time.
Former NFL defensive again and present analyst Ryan Clark is amongst those that have defended Bowles for persevering with to chase a possible win. The Buccaneers trailed by 10 factors with roughly one minute remaining in regulation of the Baltimore contest.
“This isn’t highschool,” Clark mentioned throughout an look on ESPN’s “SportsCenter” program, as shared by Sam Neumann of Terrible Saying. “This isn’t school, the place you get to tug all the crew the place everyone has a freaking backup. You signal as much as go win video games. You’re paid for what you do every day, each single second, each single minute of each single recreation. And Todd Bowles by no means desires that crew to assume that he gave up on them and people gamers and the individuals in these helmets. The blokes with these headsets by no means need Todd Bowles to assume that they don’t imagine they’ve an opportunity to win.”
As the NFL’s website noted, the Buccaneers turned the second crew of the continuing season to get better its personal onside kick earlier than Godwin went down with the brutal harm. Following the defeat that dropped Tampa Bay to 4-3 on the marketing campaign, quarterback Baker Mayfield backed Bowles’ call to proceed enjoying for a win and urged he and others on the sideline believed that they had at the least an opportunity of finishing what would have been a miracle comeback.
“We’ve a gaggle of fighters,” Mayfield mentioned throughout his postgame feedback. “All of us needed an opportunity to attempt to win that factor any manner, a way, one way or the other.”
Clark considerably echoed Mayfield’s take.
“And Chris Godwin, God bless him as a result of I understand how laborious it’s to cope with an harm — and to see their faces after seeing how grotesque it was, I get it — however that’s the place he needed to be. That’s the defend he needed to exit on,” Clark added in the course of the phase.
Tampa Bay gamers might have felt in a different way concerning the state of affairs had Godwin gone down on the sport’s closing play, with the Buccaneers trailing by a number of scores. Bowles’ refusal to lift the white flag when sending the competition to additional time was nonetheless attainable, nevertheless it might be a season-defining second for the membership if it helps carry the locker room collectively.
As of Wednesday morning, DraftKings Sportsbook listed the Buccaneers as 2.5-point underdogs for this coming Sunday’s dwelling recreation in opposition to the 4-3 Atlanta Falcons.