Lavonte David References Bucs Adjustment Challenges, Praises Todd Bowles
February 16th, 2026
What went wrong with the Bucs last season?
Tampa Bay nosedived from 6-2 to 7-9 before winning the season finale.
Lavonte David still can’t figure it out completely, so he explained on a post-Super Bowl edition of the Caps Off podcast.
“At some point in that time we kind of like lost focus [during the second half of the season], lost track of what we were trying to accomplish. But it is what it is,” David offered.
“Maybe we just didn’t adjust, you know, throughout the season. And sometimes you get so comfortable with certain people being out there on the field and being able to call things a certain way, and then sometimes you end up getting stagnant and getting predictable in certain ways, where you don’t have certain guys available to do these things. So, like I said, I can’t really point my finger at exactly what [our losing slide] was.”‘
David went on to say the team never wavered internally and Todd Bowles was a big part of that.
“We felt like we could beat anybody we played against. … We never lost our confidence,” David said. “That’s a testament to Coach Bowles, too. You know, he was always positive. He’s never up and down. So he definitely was like even-keeled the whole time, just like, ‘Man, we gotta find a way. Leaders gotta lead, players gotta be able to step up more than usual.'”
The Bucs played a lot of young players last season, and many were thrust into key roles, David noted. He speculated that could be one small part of the season’s struggles.
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