Many cuts to come Terry Beckner Tampa Bay Buccaneers Jersey , but don’t expect many big signings"WhiteFanposts Fanshots Sections 2016 NFL DraftInjuriesFree AgencyGame FilmNFL Free AgencyBuccaneers Free AgencyToday's NFL NewsUpdated salary cap situation for Tampa BayNew,48commentsMany cuts to come, but don’t expect many big signingsESTShareTweetShareShareUpdated salary cap situation for Tampa BayKim Klement-USA TODAY SportsThe Tampa Bay Buccaneers got their off season moves underway this past week by releasing Vinny Curry, and saving $8 million dollars in the process. According to Spotrac, the Buccaneers currently sit at 24th in the league with $15 million dollars in cap space - not including the $8.5 million that is set to go to their draft picks. Factor in the picks, and Jason Licht currently has about $5.8 million to work with. With rumors of Donovan Smith likely receiving a contract in the $12-$14 million dollar range and you're looking at a current cap figure in the negatives. Yikes. With tons of work to do on both sides of the ball, specifically in the trenches and secondary, that is not a comforting thought. Fortunately, the Buccaneers do have options. Now, you can’t cut everyone with no dead cap because then you obviously need to fill a lot of holes, but other cuts will be made. The question is just how many. First, I believe the team will start by cutting Gerald McCoy. The cap hit of $13 million simply doesn’t line up with the production at this point in his career and frankly, the Buccaneers just can’t afford to pay him that kind of money with all their other needs. Not factoring in the Donovan Smith contract, $13 million freed up would give the Buccaneers about $18.5 million (factoring in draft picks). The next move that many people expect is DeSean Jackson to be on his way out. Personally, I don’t think this is a forgone conclusion, especially after the news this week that the team is likely to lose Adam Humphries in free agency, but for the purpose of this article, let’s say the Buccaneers do indeed move on from him and save $10 million dollars. That would put them at an estimated $28.5 million dollars, again, not factoring in Smith’s contract or franchise tag.Next up on the list of a potential cut/trade candidate is Cameron Brate. Brate is due $7 million dollars next season and that is simply too much for a backup tight end. Brate is a good football player, but he is replaceable and that $7 million dollars could go a long way in solving some secondary or offensive line issues. The cutting of Brate would bring the number to $35.5 million. The two most obvious cuts up next would be William Gholston and Mitch Unrein. Combined, the team would save $7.5 million and increase the available cap space to $43 million. Some other options are Demar Dotson ($4.8 million), Beau Allen ($5 million) and Bryan Anger ($3 million). Even if all of those players were cut, which they won’t be because you simply cant replace everyone with better players, the Buccaneers would have about $55-$56 million in space. Factor in Donovan Smith and possibly Kwon Alexander and that number shoots down to about $30 million. Obviously, you have to replace all the guys who were cut and build depth at the same time, so if I was a Buccaneer fan, I wouldn’t expect any splash free agent signings outside of maybe one big name. It’ll be interesting to see how Jason Licht and Bruce Arians work the roster, but right now, the cap situation doesn’t look pretty. After Dirk Koetter was hired to replace Lovie Smith as head coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 2016, he hired his own former head coach Mike Smith to run the defense. They had been together in Atlanta for several seasons before being fired in favor of Dan Quinn and Kyle Shanahan. Perhaps there’s something to be said about familiarity. Perhaps there’s more to be said about nepotism and hiring friends, as opposed to the best people you can find for the job.The Bucs had struggled for years to put together a good defense. Lovie’s last defense in 2015 had finished 26th vs the pass and ninth against the rush using an antiquated base scheme that was predictable and soft. He had hired his two sons, who were arguably unqualified, along with guys who had no NFL coaching experience or had so many years they were retired before Lovie brought them on. While the national media railed agains the Bucs for terminating him, the firing was justified. In Mike “Smitty” Smith’s first year coordinating the defense, they were ranked sixth vs the pass and 26th vs the rush. But it was all smoke and mirrors, a ranking built on unsustainable turnover luck that hid a defense among the worst in giving up yards through the air. Predictably, the turnover luck ran out, and in 2017 the defense bottomed out as the worst in the NFL. They had the worst adjusted sack rate in the league, at 4.3 percent, more than two percent worse than an average defense. His quarters and cover three coverages were predictable and soft.In May 2018, Mike Smith had this to say: They had nowhere to go but up. Or so we thought. Through the first three games of 2018, not only has the defense not gotten better from its league-low mark, it has regressed even further. Whereas last season they finished 11.7 percent worse than average on a per-play basis, through three games in 2018 they have been 21 percent worse than how an average defense could be expected to perform. And that was before being gashed by pedestrian young quarterback Mitchell Trubisky on Sunday.This, despite overhauling the defense with seven new players. They signed Vinny Curry, Beau Allen, and Mitch Unrein in free agency, traded for edge rusher Jason Pierre-Paul, and drafted nose tackle Vita Vea in the first round and cornerbacks Carlton Davis and M.J. Stewart in the second round. Despite all the new players along the defensive line, through three games their adjusted sack rate was a below-average 5.5 percent, just 1.2 percent better than last season’s league-low mark and 1.5 percent lower than the current league average. In short 2019 Terry Beckner Jersey , it is the second-worst defense in Tampa Bay history, second only to the worst pass defense of all time, the 1986 Bucs, who had a DVOA of 26.1 percent. And that was before letting Trubisky throw for six touchdowns. From the Bucs’ blowout loss to the Bears on Sunday:How could they possibly be so much worse despite adding so many better players?In 2004 the NFL changed the rules regarding pass defense, and the league experienced an explosion in passing and passing efficiency. With it had to come a change in philosophy - defenses needed to key on stopping the pass. While Adrian Peterson and Chris Johnson managed 2,000 yards rushing in 2012 and 2009 respectively, they are outliers; the last flashes of a different, now dead era. The league is, with the help of strictly enforced roughing-the-passer rules and the full-blown league-wide adoption of modern spread passing concepts, currently going through another explosion in passing efficiency in 2018. Mike Smith had this to say before the 2018 season:I get it. At least in theory. If you can stop the run on first down, you can force defenses into third-and-long passing-down situations that heavily favor defenses. And the league does, or did, have a problem with running on first down too much. That 2016 defense was good on third-downs. It’s not just Mike Smith that’s living in the past, though. Dirk Koetter is too. They both have repeatedly shown a misguided fixation on the importance of the running game. What’s so disturbing is they hold this early-2000s viewpoint right in the midst of the greatest passing explosion the league has ever seen. See, the problem is it’s now easier and more efficient than ever to pass. Teams don’t need to ever run except in short-yardage situations and inside the five-yard line. The passing game has become so extreme that when team’s run outside of those situations they are mathematically leaving yards on the field by choosing to do something less efficient. You do it for the sake of being less predictable. What’s ironic is Mike Smith’s defense would probably only be good at defending an offense being play-called by Dirk Koetter.But that doesn’t explain what the Bucs are doing, and why it’s not working, or how we got here. To answer that, we have to go back to what Mike Smith tried to do in Atlanta. In this 2014 article written just after Mike Smith was fired by Atlanta, Falcons owner Arthur Blank made the following illuminating comments:Vita Vea, anyone? Beau Allen? Vinny Curry? Does this sound familiar?Koetter hired Smith and gave him the go-ahead and another chance to build his scheme. And like Dimitroff, Tampa Bay general manager Jason Licht has done his job to facilitate Smitty’s philosophy. The issue is the philosophy itself. Then there’s this excellent Ringer piece from January 2017:You can build a defense front to back, reliant on a tremendous front seven to help cover a less-talented secondary, as the Panthers have done successfully for years. Or you can build back to front, with insane playmakers in the secondary. Or you can do both, like the Jacksonville Jaguars have done. What Smith ended up doing in Atlanta was take their even-front (4 defensive linemen) players and added odd-front players.The result was a unit that didn’t have enough players to run either scheme effectively.I can partially see the philosophy. He wanted Vea to be his Paul Soliai. You draft Vea to two-gap, eat blockers and space. To hold the line of scrimmage against the running game. Keep your speedy linebackers free and clean to make plays. That in theory allows more one-on-one matchups for your All-Pro 3-tech Gerald McCoy, and for Pro-Bowler Jason Pierre-Paul and QB-pressure machine Vinny Curry. That should lead to long third downs right?But despite making his NFL debut vs the Bears and playing 54 percent of the snaps, Vea has missed so much time, and his backup, Beau Allen, is also hurt. Vea looked like what he was coming out of Washington - a two-down nose tackle. And the Bucs have been decimated in the secondary with injuries as well. That might help explain Trubisky’s historic day. But it doesn’t explain being the worst defense in the league two years in a row.Smith has made the same mistakes in Tampa Bay that he did in Atlanta. Few teams run strictly two-gap schemes anymore. They are usually one-gap or hybrid gaps, which is what this Smith scheme is. That’s fine, in theory, as long as the goal is to get upfield to rush the passer. But the Bucs’ execution leaves much to be desired. The Bucs have Gerald McCoy, who is a fit for a one-gap scheme, along with linebackers Lavonte David and Kwon Alexander, and edge rusher Jason Pierre-Paul. Then they have two-gappers, like Vita Vea and William Gholston and Vinny Curry. Edge rusher Noah Spence has regressed after trying to make him a 4-3 edge rusher, then having him add weight. Controlling the line of scrimmage isn’t enough. You have to be disruptive.Add to it small off-coverage cornerbacks like the soon-to-be-retired Brent Grimes, and trying to mold 2016’s first-round pick Vernon Hargreaves III into something similar. They’ve paired them with big lengthy cornerbacks who should be playing in press-man coverage like Carlton Davis and maybe even Ryan Smith, with smaller nickel cornerbacks like M.J. Stewart. The result is even when healthy this Bucs defense is a mixed-up mismatched hodge-podge of players.Smith, in the golden age of passing, believes that having a strong run-stopping interior backed by soft coverage to prevent big plays is the key to great defensive play. He believes players can play in zone with an eye on the quarterback and break on the ball. Except turnovers are largely based on luck. The result is the Bucs can’t stop anything, or at least nothing that matters. They can’t rush the passer. They aren’t in position to contest catches. And they can’t tackle to limit yards after the catch. They can’t even defend the edge in the run game.But the idea is to get teams to third-and-long. Keep everything in front of you and rally to the football.The Bears game on Sunday is a microcosm exposing the problem of his philosophy:The running game has become irrelevant as the NFL is quickly becoming a position-less league. Safety-linebacker hybrids like Derwin James, or safety-cornerback hybrids like Minkah Fitzpatrick are being drafted to combat wide receiver-tight end hybrids like O.J. Howard and Evan Engram. Or wide receiver-running back hybrids like 100-reception players Alvin Kamara and Christian McCaffrey, who are coincidentally on the Bucs’ schedule four times a year. When even running backs are just catching passes, how important is stopping the run? Enough to base your entire defense around it? What if I told you that philosophy as a base scheme has gone the way of the Tampa 2? What if your pass defense is so bad and predictable no one needs to run against you anyway?And so Mike Smith, enabled by Jason Licht but especially Dirk Koetter, has repeated his mistakes from Atlanta. A failed experiment twice-over.It is difficult to argue someone should lose their job. That they should have to uproot their family. But Mike Smith is untenable. He has created a situation that will take years to fix. And that’s if his replacement has a clear vision, the steadfast ability to execute that vision with the rest of the front office, and only if that vision is compatible with the evolution of the NFL. Mike Smith’s tenure in Tampa Bay has failed to do any of those things. Will Dirk Koetter’s mistake doom his own tenure in Tampa Bay? We may find out this season.