Reporter shamefully mistakes Byron Leftwich for Todd Bowles after Super Bowl LV

After he helped his team win Super Bowl LV, Buccaneers offensive coordinator Byron Leftwich had to deal with a shameful question.

Buccaneers offensive coordinator Byron Leftwich had just sat down at the podium following his team’s win in Super Bowl LV. Leftwich had just put together an offensive game plan in concert with head coach Bruce Arians that allowed the Bucs to rack up 340 net yards and four touchdowns in Tampa Bay’s 31-9 win. The Bucs rode all over the Chiefs’ preferred dime both with the run and the pass, and Leftwich had to justifiably feel that he would be recognized — literally — as one of the primary architects of a win that also had Tom Brady winning yet another Super Bowl MVP award.

Then, the first question of Leftwich’s media session came, from someone identified as “Michael Donaldson.”

“Hey, coach, great win. Congratulations. Going into the game, what was your No. 1 goal on the defensive side to shut [Patrick] Mahomes down, to shut that high-powered offense down. What was your guys’s No. 1 goal going into that game?”

Leftwich was understandably taken aback.

“To shut Pat Mahomes down? I think you got the wrong guy. I had nothing to do with that. That was Todd.”

Emojis aside, it should be crushingly obvious why this isn’t funny at all. Both Leftwich and Bowles are Black, both of them just coached among the games of their lives, and now, Leftwich has to deal with this. At this moment.

Leftwich laughed it off and moved on, and the press conference continued, but… not a good look.

What you would like to be able to do is to chalk this up to the business of a post-Super Bowl press situation. I’ve been involved in several, and even in person, there’s absolutely no way this would happen. You are very much aware, in the bowels of any stadium, exactly who you’re talking to. There are placards at every podium.

As for the Zoom nature of these press conferences, they are even more delineated. You can’t just jump into one meeting from another. You have to leave one presser to attend another. And if your question is the first question, as Donaldson’s was, that means you’ve been waiting for a while. Also, it’s clear that the Zoom host identifies Leftwich at the start of the presser, though he mispronounces Leftwich’s first name and Leftwich has to call him out on that. 

As for the labeling of the pressers, you have to really miss to take the wrong shot to get into a Leftwich presser when you want to talk to Bowles. I mean, by a lot. Here’s how the postgame video downloads are set up — pretty much the same as the live availabilities.

In my case, I was able to click on a link to Bowles’ live availability to help me with a story on Bowles’ own game plan with no trouble whatsoever.

Why is this a problem? In an era where the hiring for NFL coaches is screaming for more diversity with very little positive response, you’d think the people on this side of the equation — the writers and other news gatherers responsible for bringing awareness to the work of Byron Leftwich and Todd Bowles — would at least be able to get this stuff right.

I am not going to ascribe any specific misunderstanding or malice to Michael Donaldson in this case because I don’t even know who Michael Donaldson is.

To do so in this case would be to assume, shamefully, that he’s just like everyone else.