Tampa Bay Buccaneers Stick With Coach Greg Schiano As Masses Call For His Ouster
Life must be rough when you have billboards and Twitter hashtag calling for you to be fired from your job. Ask Tampa Bay Buccaneers coach Greg Schiano.
#FireSchiano is the rallying cry of Buccaneers fans on Twitter. It gets used A LOT. But hey, Tampa Bay fans can gripe and Schiano can go about his business and ignore it. No big deal. Then there are the 19 billboards around Tampa Bay that say the same thing.
Yikes.
“The ‘Fire Schiano’ billboard is simply a reflection of the Tampa Bay community’s opinion of the Buccaneers’ head coach,” said Michael Sharkey, program director for 102.5 The Bone, via Pro Football Talk.
“This is mirroring the sentiment of the community, that’s really what this is. It’s not directed at the Glazers or anything like that, this is what we’re hearing at the Bone,” Sharkey told My Fox Tampa Bay.
The Tampa Bay based Cox radio station is responsible for the billboards.
So Does anyone like the Buccaneers’ coach? Surely Tampa Bay players, right? Maybe not.
“How bad is it there? It’s worse than you can imagine,” a 2012 Buccaneers player told NFL.com’s Michael Silver. “It’s like being in Cuba.”
OK, not Buccaneers players. Fellow coaches perhaps? Oh wait, the Tampa Bay coach hasn’t made many friends in his first two years in the NFL. Tom Coughlin doesn’t seem too keen on him after Schiano ordered the bucs to blitz Coughlin’s New York Giants and QB Eli Manning in victory formation last year.
“I don’t think you do that at this level,” Coughlin said after the game.
Schiano had Tampa Bay do the same thing against Eli’s big brother Peyton Manning and the Denver Broncos, prompting a stronger reaction.
“Peyton cussed him out,” former Buccaneers defensive end Michael Bennett told Silver. “And I ain’t never heard Peyton cuss.”
Bennett said the move wasn’t popular with Tampa Bay players either.
“People just really hate it when you have to dive at people’s legs,” Bennett says. “At the end of the day, we’ve got to keep going and move onto the next game and try to make a living. Some of these guys (on other teams) are our friends.”
Friends seem to be in short supply for Greg Schiano.
Should the Tampa Bay Buccaneers fire Greg Schiano? Who should replace Schiano in Tampa Bay? Will the Buccaneers finish the season winless?
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