Todd Bowles hot seat: what an 0-2 start actually means for his job

Hall of Famer Shannon Sharpe did not wait long after Tampa Bay's 19-23 home loss to the Cleveland Browns on September 20. On his podcast Nightcap, Sharpe looked into the camera and told Todd Bowles directly, "Todd Bowles, you on the hot seat, bro." He was not the only one. Pro Football Network analyst Joe Rutland wrote that Bowles' seat was "hotter than a Hawaii volcano." Pewter Report called the loss "inexcusable." Within a day of the Buccaneers falling to 0-2 for the first time since 2014, the phrase "hot seat" was everywhere in American football media.

Key facts

• Todd Bowles is 35-35 as Tampa Bay's head coach after the Buccaneers' 19-23 home loss to the Cleveland Browns dropped them to 0-2 in 2026.
• Bowles won three straight NFC South titles from 2022 through 2024 before an 8-9, non-playoff 2025 season.
• Since 2002, only around one in eight NFL teams that started a season 0-2 has gone on to make the playoffs.
• The Glazer family signed Bowles and general manager Jason Licht to new contracts in the summer of 2025 and publicly stood by Bowles again in January and March of 2026.
• Bowles called the Buccaneers' locker room angrily optimistic on Monday, three days before Tampa Bay hosts the 2-0 Minnesota Vikings on September 27.

For a reader outside the United States, that phrase needs unpacking before it can be judged. "Hot seat" is NFL shorthand for a coach or executive whose job is presumed to be in danger, usually invoked by media and fans rather than by the team itself. It gets attached quickly, often after a single bad week, and it is frequently wrong: plenty of coaches survive a hot seat label and plenty of teams that fire in a panic regret it. It is a temperature reading of public mood, not a legal or contractual fact. So what does it actually mean for Bowles, two games into his fifth season, and is it fair?

Bowles' record in Tampa

The numbers are not what a 0-2 start alone suggests. Bowles took over the Buccaneers in 2022 and immediately won the NFC South, going 8-9 in a weak division before losing 14-31 at Dallas in the Wild Card round. He repeated the division title in 2023 at 9-8, this time beating the Philadelphia Eagles 32-9 in the Wild Card round before losing 23-31 at the Detroit Lions in the Divisional round, the deepest playoff run of his tenure. In 2024 Tampa Bay went 10-7 and won a third straight division title, then lost 20-23 to the Washington Commanders in the Wild Card round.

Then came 2025. Tampa Bay started 6-2 and collapsed to 8-9, missing the playoffs entirely and finishing second in a division it had won three years running. That season, not this one, is the real source of the pressure on Bowles: he is 35-35 overall with the Buccaneers and 1-3 in the playoffs, a record with a genuinely strong first half and a genuinely disappointing second half.

What history says about 0-2

The instinct to treat two losses as a crisis is understandable, but the historical record argues against panic in September specifically. According to research published this week, only around one in eight NFL teams that started a season 0-2 between 2002 and 2025 went on to make the playoffs, and older studies going back to 1970 put the number closer to one in ten. That is a real disadvantage, not a myth, but it is also not a death sentence: in recent seasons more than one 0-2 team has recovered to reach the postseason, a modest improvement analysts link to the 17-game schedule and the expanded 14-team playoff field. The honest reading is that 0-2 makes the Buccaneers' path harder, not that it has already decided their season, and certainly not that it says much on its own about the coach.

What the Glazers have actually done

Coaching security in the NFL is set by ownership, not by podcasts. Here the Buccaneers' actual behavior looks different from the online mood. In the summer of 2025, before any of this season's struggles, the Glazer family signed Bowles and general manager Jason Licht to new multi-year contracts, with co-chairman Joel Glazer citing Bowles' three consecutive division titles. After the 2025 collapse, ownership had a clean opportunity to move on and chose not to. Licht told reporters at the NFL's Annual Meeting in March that Bowles remained "the right man to steady the ship." Two games into 2026, the Glazers have made no public statement suggesting that has changed, and Bowles is under contract beyond this season. A franchise that has fired six coaches since Malcolm Glazer bought the team in 1995, including Jon Gruden six years after he won Super Bowl XXXVII, is capable of moving fast when it decides to. So far, nothing on the record shows that decision has been made in September.

Bowles' own answer

Bowles has not hidden from the criticism or blamed his players publicly. After Sunday's loss, he told reporters plainly, "We've got to pull ourselves up by our boots and we've got to win," adding pointedly, "nobody is coming to save us." On Monday, asked about the mood inside the building, he called it "angrily optimistic," a coach's way of saying his team is frustrated with itself but not resigned. It is a notably different tone from a year ago, when the same team's late-season fade drew accusations of a group that had stopped playing hard for him. Whether that answer holds up depends entirely on what happens next.

Minnesota decides more than the noise does

That test arrives fast. The Buccaneers host the Minnesota Vikings on Sunday, September 27, at Raymond James Stadium, and it is hard to overstate how much more that game will tell us than Sharpe's podcast did. Minnesota is 2-0, and starting quarterback Kyler Murray has cleared the concussion protocol and will return after backup Carson Wentz carried the Vikings to both wins. As covered in BucsWorld's Week 1 recap against the Bengals and Week 2 recap against the Browns, turnovers and a shaky red zone offense, not a single collapsing scheme, have driven both losses. BucsWorld's earlier look at the Todd Bowles defense, by the numbers already flagged the unit's blitz production as a concern before the season started, and that problem has not gone away against Cleveland. Full details on kickoff and how to watch are on the Week 3 schedule page.

The fair position is not that Bowles is safe, and it is not that he should already be gone. It is that two losses, by themselves, tell you almost nothing that his ownership did not already know when it re-signed him. The Glazers bet on Bowles again this year with their eyes open. A loss to a 2-0 Vikings team on September 27 would make that bet look worse and the hot seat talk louder. A win would not silence Shannon Sharpe, but it would be the first real evidence, one way or the other, since the calendar turned to September.