Should the Buccaneers fire Lovie Smith?

The Tampa Bay Buccaneers are bad. They're 3-5, they continue to be terrible on defense and the main reason they're winning games instead of losing them like last year is that they added Jameis Winston and Dirk Koetter. Lovie Smith's specialty, though, continues to be a problem. That's an issue for a head coach who won just two games last year, and needs to justify his continued employment this season.

No one knows what the Glazers will do, but it's difficult to see a scenario where they hang on to Lovie Smith if this team doesn't at least show the promise of improvement over the second half of the season. But that's for the end of the year, calls for Lovie Smith's firing have slowed down after the win against the Atlanta Falcons and the not-disastrous performance against the New York Giants, but they're still in existence. I doubt those two games changed many people's minds.

That doesn't necessarily mean that firing Lovie Smith now is productive. Every time anyone takes a good hard look at the results of firing coaches midseason in the NFL, the result is a resounding 'meh'. Your team's not going to get worse, but it's unlikely to get any better either. And the downside is: you can get stuck with an interim coach who really isn't ready for the job, simply because he won a few more games than his predecessor over a small sample size. See Bill Barnwell's recent analysis of interim coaches turned permanent head coaches.

Still, that won't stop the calls for Lovie Smith's job. So what do you say? Should they fire Lovie Smith?