Editor’s note: This story is part of Peak, The Athletic’s desk covering leadership, personal development and performance through the lens of sports. Follow Peak here.
Bruce Arians was the head coach of the Arizona Cardinals and Tampa Bay Buccaneers. He worked with Todd Bowles, the current coach of the Bucs, at both stops. Arians is now a senior adviser for the Bucs.
What separates Bucs coach Todd Bowles from other leaders is not just that he’s smart. A lot of smart people have great ideas, but they can’t teach. And if you can’t teach, you can’t coach. They go hand in hand.
What separates Todd is that he can teach.
The whole key to coaching is to make something digestible and relatable to your players. You can know everything there is to know in football, but if you can’t teach it to other coaches or other players, it’s useless knowledge.
There are three styles of teaching: teaching in front of a large group, teaching in front of a small group and teaching individually. Todd is great at all three, and that sets him apart.
If you think about some of the classes you took in college that were in auditoriums, he’s great in that setting. He’s also fantastic in small groups. And he’s excellent one-on-one in those 5 o’clock in the morning meetings with a defensive back. Sit on the couch and let me teach you how to play. Not just Xs and Os on the board, but the fundamentals: You step with this foot first, you tackle this way — he’s so good at teaching all of that stuff to young players.
When you know what you’re doing as a leader and you can teach it, your players become extremely engaged and trust is built very quickly.
Todd has always been that way.
He was a safety for me at Temple back in the 1980s. I was a first-time head coach and was lucky he was on the roster when I was hired. There was no transfer portal back then, so I got to keep all the good guys. In the first spring practices, we all realized he was special. Our secondary coach, Nick Rapone, who is now actually Todd’s safeties coach with the Bucs, came up to me.
“We can do a lot of stuff with this guy,” he said. “He gets it. He really gets it. He can check us. He can move us. He can do anything we want.”
Todd became one of my captains and was one of the smartest players I’ve ever coached. We were getting ready to play Penn State, and we had just put in two or three very unique coverages back then. They were complicated, and only Todd could run them. Thursday before the game, he jumped off for an interception and broke his wrist. That one injury took us completely out of that game plan because Todd was that unique and that smart.
He really took the young guys under his wing after he got hurt. He became another coach. He got guys fired up on the sideline, coached them up on the sideline, told them what he saw. I always knew the coaching part was in him.
I gave him advice once: “Hey, I think you might want to get into coaching because I don’t know if you’ll make it in the NFL.”
He only went and played 10 years in the league to prove me wrong. That’s because smart, tough guys make it in the NFL. He still likes to remind me of that.
In 2013, I was interviewing with the Chicago Bears to become their head coach. I thought I was going to get hired. Todd had just been let go from the Eagles, along with Andy Reid. I told Todd, “Look, if I get this job with the Bears, I want you to be my coordinator.”
I didn’t get the Bears job, but I did get the Arizona Cardinals job that same year, so I brought him with me. Our defense was top 10 in the NFL in his two seasons as defensive coordinator.
I know Todd comes across as very quiet, but let me tell you: He’s anything but that with the players. He knows how to push their buttons in both directions. When he needs to get on their ass, he gets on their ass.
We played a game in Arizona one year, and we had just given up a touchdown right before halftime. The defense had its own separate space in the locker room. I went into the locker room and heard chairs flying. It sounded like a fight was happening. I asked someone what the hell was going on, and they just told me: “Oh, Bowles was just getting them ready.”
That may surprise some people, but he has that in him. Trust me. Our defense played a hell of a second half, and we won that game.
He’s real. He ain’t bulls—-ing nobody. He’s just going to tell you the way it is. When you mess up, he’s going to call you out, but he’s also going to tell you the way to fix it. And you’re going to hustle. You’re definitely going to hustle when you play for him.
Todd became the head coach of the New York Jets in 2015, and I retired from the Cardinals three years later. But when I decided to come back to coach the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 2019, he was available again to be my defensive coordinator. That was one of the reasons I came out of retirement and took the Bucs job.
The best game plan I ever saw him put together was for the Super Bowl against the Kansas City Chiefs. The Chiefs had smoked us earlier in the year. We played a lot of man-to-man coverage against them in the first game. I’m pretty sure Tyreek Hill had 200 receiving yards against us at halftime. They were the highest-powered offense in the league, and they just ate us up.
The second time around, Todd totally changed how we played. He played a lot more zone. He mixed in some blitzes. He came up with these really cool gimmicks and twists and turns with the defensive line and how we used them. The coverage schemes were just fantastic.
I know Kansas City’s offensive line was banged up, but I think Patrick Mahomes ran for five miles trying to get away from our defensive line. What Todd did was just amazing. He got everyone to buy into his plan. I thought it was masterful. And it was a perfect example of what I’m talking about: Todd is smart, but, most importantly, he can teach those ideas to his players.