Arians Retirement Doesn’t Pass The Smell Test

This Tampa Bay Drama Is Fit For Daytime Television

Paul Rochon: Did you see his comments about Todd Bowles and why he chose now to do this?

A.J. Reilly: I did and it seemed strange because earlier, on Straight Shooting last week, our buddy Dylan was hosting that show with me because our buddy Matt was out of town and we were talking about Bruce Arians retiring. And we were like, okay, this would be a great time to put one of the hottest coaching candidates in for Bruce Arians in Byron Leftwich. And then we hit, end record and it was like, Bruce Arian is stepping down so that Todd Bowles can take over.

It was just a head-scratcher kind of moment. Right. The whole scenario around him stepping down for the transition process seems more, in my opinion, like coverage rather than actual reasoning. If that makes any sense. It just seems like you were talking about the AB situation, which there's a lot of controversy, even around that whole thing with text messages and such.

I go to the way that Brady kind of ran the show in New England, he comes down to Tampa Bay and wants to run the show. Like you said, but even small things. Where things can kind of seem to spin out of control where Brady‘s like, I'm not sitting on the bench I'm going in and I'm throwing a pass to Gronk so that he hits this contract bonus.

Right? Those kinds of little things as a head coach, probably just as you said, just chiseled away at the stone a little bit further and further until it cracked. Now, do we know that there's drama going on? Do we know that there's, you know, it's all unsubstantiated? But it does seem strange. Very strange.

Paul Rochon: Well, if you follow the logic, you kind of pieced together the areas and Brady just did not love working together in weather areas. Ultimately decided to leave the coaching position because Brady may come back or whether Brady a condition of him coming back was areas not being the coach. It's really kind of semantics because at the end of the day, despite what's being said publicly, you really can start to make assumptions about their relationship.

And I want to look at it just from a simple point of view, the things that they've said don't match up with the actions that have happened. If you look at Bruce Arians, all the things he said about Todd Bowles and how now is the time he has Tom Brady is a great transition year. Don't leave him with a rebuilding team.

Well, you could have done that last year. If your health was a concern, and if you wanted to step out of coaching, we know that the Glazers, and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers are honoring his contract in his new role. They're still going to pay the same. So it's not like, oh, we wanted a coach for the money. So you won a Super Bowl?

If you really want. That concerned you could have done this last year while Brady's contract wasn't up in a pending retirement. Wasn't even a possibility because you knew he was running it back, so that doesn't really pass the smell test. Then you look at Arians' comments when he was coming back and the things he said about coaching this year and how adamant he was, that he was going to coach this year and possibly beyond.

Now all of a sudden he's ready to just pass the torch. Coincidentally, a couple of weeks after Brady retired, it doesn't make a lot of sense.

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