Fired Bucs offensive coordinator Josh Grizzard.
Fired Tampa Bay rookie offensive coordinator Josh Grizzard, a Bucs’ 2025 fall guy, had many tough tasks on his hands this season.
No matter how much the Bucs touted their team-first culture, Grizzard was always going to have to deal with spreading the ball around to keep players happy.
Grizzard entered the season under pressure to get Mike Evans 1,000 yards. Chris Godwin was coming back and would need touches to find his way — whether he earned them or not. Emeka Egbuka was a first-round pick and Grizzard knew that investment meant Ebuka needed targets to develop. The Bucs also had three quality running backs with different skill sets and a tight end coming off a strong season.
The Bucs were stacked with weapons and, per running back Rachaad White, that wasn’t always a blessing.
“When you look on paper, of course, you’re loaded,” White told Loose Cannons last week aftter being asked about what went wrong for the Bucs offense. “I don’t know. It’s hard. There’s only one football, though, man. So it’s really tough. It’s really hard. And then, you know, football has a lot of egos.”
White then quickly talked about not wanting to get clipped for social media talking about egos. He didn’t want fans to think egos were a major issue, though White acknowledged his own ego led to him questioning coaches and seeking a fresh start elsewhere in 2026.
White also thinks the 2025 Bucs offense got too far away from simple, effective football.
“I think we’re trying to like get everybody the ball in the right manner or in the right way, and do this and do that. I don’t think it just went as planned,” White said.
“A lot of things were just tough all over the place. We won some big games, especially without a lot of our main guys, as well. I don’t know. We probably try to make things more complicated than what it is and what it was. I think some of the guys we got, too, you can just get the ball in their hands and let them out and space and just let them create; let them get in a flow, get in a rhythm and things like that.”
White said he talked to Bucky Irving about how former Bucs playcaller Dave Canales kept the offense simpler and more in rhythm by starting games with “pitch-and-catch” throws that are good for Baker Mayfield, receivers and the offense as a whole.
Overall, White didn’t offer many answers for the Bucs offense falling off.
“Things just kind of started spiraling,” he said. “It got ugly from there, man. It got ugly from there. You could just tell.”