Bruce Arians steps down as Bucs coach; Todd Bowles picked as successor

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Add this to the craziest, newsiest NFL offseason in modern league history: Bruce Arians, who coached the Buccaneers to a Super Bowl LV victory less than 14 months ago, is stepping aside to take a front-office role with the team effective immediately.

Tampa Bay will install Arians’ preferred successor, defensive coordinator Todd Bowles, as the new head coach. Bowles, 58, previously coached the Jets to a 24-40 record in 2015-18, his only full-time head-coaching job. Bowles, who is Black, would become the sixth minority head coach in the league, joining Mike Tomlin (Pittsburgh), Ron Rivera (Washington), Robert Saleh (Jets), Mike McDaniel (Miami) and Lovie Smith (Houston).

Arians, 69, said his new job would be as “senior consultant for football,” and that gig will start with Tampa Bay’s 2022 draft prep.

The move comes as a surprise but perhaps not a shock. Arians, the most colorful coach in a buttoned-up pro game, said he started thinking about stepping aside at the NFL Scouting Combine a month ago. He is a prostate-cancer survivor and was hospitalized due to an illness late in his first head-coach tenure in Indianapolis in 2012. He’s suffering from a torn Achilles today. But when he explained his reasons, health wasn’t the big thing.

He said he’s relinquishing the Tampa job because “succession has always been huge for me. With the organization in probably the best shape it’s been in its history, with Tom Brady coming back … I’d rather see Todd in position to be successful and not have to take some [crappy] job. I’m probably retiring next year anyway, in February. So, I control the narrative right now. I don’t control it next February because [if] Brady gets hurt, we go 10-7, and it’s an open interview for the job … I got 31 [coaches and their] families that depend on me. My wife is big on not letting all those families down.”

Arians explained his reasoning in a telephone interview with NBC Sports and the Los Angeles Times.

He was scheduled to inform his coaching staff in an 8 p.m. Zoom call Wednesday, and he planned to send a message to his players explaining his decision concurrent with telling his coaches.

In a way, Arians said, Brady coming out of retirement encouraged him to move on. In a 25-minute conversation, Arians explained the reasons for this decision dated back to February 2021.

“It hit me after the Super Bowl,” he said. “I thought really hard about going out on top. Then it was like, nah, let’s go for two. [The 2021 season] was a grind with all the injuries but still winning and getting to where we got. Immediately after, two to three weeks afterwards [I thought] … if I quit, my coaches get fired. I couldn’t do it then.

“Tom was kind of the key. When Tom decided to come back … and all of these guys back now, it’s the perfect timing for me just to go into the front office and still have the relationships that I love.”

Arians said he has wanted Bowles, the architect of the Bucs’ suffocating 2020 defense that held Kansas City to zero touchdowns in a 31-9 Super Bowl win, to succeed him whenever he chose to…