Monday, 4 a.m.
The next-to-the-last official play call Liam Coen made for the Tampa Bay Bucs was awful. It was second-and-one at the Washington 12, time running out. The play, a quarterback sneak, went nowhere.
The last play call Coen made was a disaster. The snap was bobbled, and a running play lost two yards.
It was a terrible way to close out a season. The Bucs tied the game on a field goal, but they couldn’t slow down Washington and lost, 23-20. Yeah, Coen had made some very good play calls during the season, but his last two were woeful.
This was worse.
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Coen, who had perhaps the best season any Bucs’ offensive coordinator ever had, slithered out of Tampa this weekend with a game plan of lies, deceit and a hide-and-seek. No one should ever blame him for taking a head coaching job — even the one in Jacksonville — but the way he did it, sneaking around in the shadows, accepting a large raise to stay and then vanishing from sight, was particularly unseemly. If there was ever a way to ruin one’s reputation in a couple of days, Coen discovered it.
No, it didn’t have to be this way. The Glazers had offered him a lot of money (granted, not head-coach money) to stay. He could have declined. He could have said “no, I want to see how this offer turns out. But at the time, Coen didn’t have the job.
So Coen took the cash, and he texted fellow coaches and players to let them know he would be back.
Hey, it isn’t an unprecedented move. Other teams have done it. The Bucs once gave Monte Kiffin a lot of money not to dangle his name to the 49ers
The next day, Coen had reconsidered. He stood to get a whole lot of money if he took the Jacksonville job. So he went on the sly to Jacksonville. Yesterday’s promises — and contract agreement — didn’t matter any more. The players he had told he would be back didn’t matter.
Mind you, at any time, he could have called the Glazers, or Jason Licht, and said that he was sorry, he had had a change of heart. He didn’t do that. I guess any offensive coordinator knows the value of misdirection.
It’s funny. Until this happened, Coen was a local star. In a graveyard of bad offensive coordinators, he was a success. He was smarter than Mike Shula and Jeff Tedford and Jeff Jagodzinski. He was more creative than Byron Leftwich and Les Steckel and John Rauch.
After this, they will curse his name for years. Not because he left, but because of how he left.
Here’s a story from the old days. Back when the NFL had the silly “Plan B” scheme — where teams protected so many players and lets the end of their roster become free agents — the Bucs once offered a kicker named Steve Christie money to stay. He took it. Then the Plan B schedule came, and Christie left like a shot to Buffalo. The Bucs were irate, of course. But here’s the thing no one remembers. The Bucs protected several mediocre players who never made a difference here. They could have easily protected Christie.
That time, it was the Bucs who were caught by their own deceit.
This time, they fell victim to Coen’s.
Goodbye, Pinocchio.