The Buccaneers’ defensive guru is trying to sell something Joe isn’t buying.
Todd Bowles loves to blitz. It’s in his DNA. He’s blitzed a lot everywhere he’s coached an NFL defense.
But this week on [WDAE radio](https://953wdae.iheart.com/featured/ronnie-and-tkras/), Bowles said he would prefer not to blitz. What?
In 2019, the Bucs had a combined 34 sacks from their top-3 edge rushers and Bowles blitzed a whopping 43.4 percent of the time, second-most in the NFL. That rate only fell to 39 percent in 2020, the Bucs’ Super Bowl season. The Bowles defense led the NFL in blitzing in 2021.
“If I have four guys that can go get the quarterback, I won’t blitz at all,” Bowles said this week. “It’ll just be coverage and let’em go ahead and go get’em. The simpler you are, the better. We blitz as needed or as we feel like wherever we need pressure from. So, you know, the more horses you got, you let’em run their race. The less horses you got, you try to help them.”
It’s nice to only rush four guys (See February 2021), but Bowles is always going to blitz a lot. And this year will be no exception, even if the four-man rush is working.
Joe would love to see Antoine Winfield get back to chasing quarterbacks, and it’ll be interesting to see if Lavonte David ends up blitzing more often than SirVocea Dennis. Joe also expects to see rookie speedster nickel cornerback Jacob Parrish getting a shot.