Super Bowl 55 Strategy Guide: Understanding the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and how they play

Exploring the philosophies and personnel that made Tampa Bay so good this year

Bruce Arians is not a man who craves change.

The Tampa Bay Buccaneers coach has essentially run the same offense, with minor tweaks, for decades now. Arians isn’t much for quick-game and he asks his quarterbacks to make difficult throws regularly.

This year, by pairing Tom Brady with the league’s most dynamic and deepest set of receiving options, he hit on a formula that propelled him to his first Super Bowl as a head coach.

While there’s plenty of pressure on Arians — since Brady and the offense may need to go score-for-score with Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs — most of the intrigue here centers around defensive coordinator Todd Bowles. The former Jets head coach is also fairly set in his ways: he likes to blitz. The rest of what his defense does isn’t all that exotic; the chaos is supposed to come from pressure on the QB.

Of course, Mahomes tends to thrive in chaos. And Brady, as he has aged, can sometimes be bothered by the hidden blitzes and disguised coverages the Chiefs’ ever-morphing defense can present. So Arians and Bowles will need to adjust. But we wouldn’t expect drastic changes from the schemes that got them this far, so let’s dig in and try to understand the philosophy and personnel that pushed the Bucs to Super Bowl 55.

(Data courtesy of Sports Info Solutions’ Datahub)