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At a breakfast meeting with club level season ticket holders (video here), Greg Schiano said that the Tampa Bay Buccaneers "needed" him at the time."What I walked into was a very, very bad situation, a very messy situation. A situation that, quite frankly, nationally the Buccaneers were the laughing stock of the National Football League. Not bad. Laughing stock. That's why I was hired. If it wasn't that situation, I don't get hired."
"We had to clean some stuff up if we're going to be where we want to be," Mark Dominik added.
I don't have any issue with calling the 2011 Tampa Bay team a national laughing stock. The Bucs had just lost ten straight, including a blowout loss to the Jacksonville Jaguars. There had been some rumblings about discipline. But the thing is, the Bucs are now much more of laughing stock than they were at the time, because most of this drama was absent under Raheem Morris. And let's be clear: losing nine of the last ten games is not any better than losing ten straight, especially given the fact that the talent level under Greg Schiano is much, much better.
Maybe the Bucs needed a Greg Schiano to clean up the locker room, but you don't bring in a head coach to fix one problem. You bring him in to lead your football team for the long term, and to be the right guy after those problems are cleared up. Because instilling some discipline? A lot of coaches do that. In fact, almost all of them do that. That alone is not enough to win games in the long term.
Besides, is that the new PR plan now? Bash the 2011 Buccaneers to make your team look better by comparison? Because looking better than the 2011 Bucs isn't exactly a strong endorsement.
If the Glazers hired Greg Schiano specifically because he was a disciplinarian, that was a mistake. That's an overreaction to what didn't work before. You cannot hire head coaches on short-term considerations, and I think we're seeing the effects of that right now.