The Tampa Bay Buccaneers defense entered the 2019 season looking to right the ship after ranking near the bottom of the league last season.
With new defensive coordinator Todd Bowles aboard, Tampa Bay has transformed themselves this season, turning out one of the NFL’s best rush defenses. The secondary has been a totally different story, but overall, Bowles has this team headed in the right direction — speed bumps aside.
Today, ESPN listed the Buccaneers’ defense as the league’s fourth most-improved this season.
Here’s part of what they had to say:
(DVOA: defense-adjusted value over average.)
“Intriguingly, this is almost all driven by a huge change in run defense DVOA. The Bucs have, by far, the best run defense DVOA in the NFL at -35.0%. Last season, they were at 3.0%, which was the second worst in the NFL… [Todd] Bowles has run an aggressive pass defense, blitzing at a 47.7% rate on dropbacks that has almost doubled the rate Tampa ran last season. Of course, that has barely touched the Bucs’ bottom-line pass defense DVOA, but their coverage players haven’t been very good, and Vernon Hargreaves was actually released. Vita Vea deserves a lot of praise for his role in buffing this run defense.”
Tampa Bay has all the pieces in place, it’s just a matter of putting it together on the field. Bowles has done a good job of making this unit respectable again, at least in the run game.
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