Tampa Bay Buccaneers Head Coach Greg Schiano Brings Law and Order to Locker Room

By Robert Neely
Featured NFL writer

It’s a tale almost as old as the NFL itself. When a franchise fires a head coach, it looks for an opposite personality in its next hire.

The Tampa Bay Buccaneers are the latest franchise to tell this tale. After firing players’ coach Raheem Morris, they hired former Rutgers head coach Greg Schiano.

Training camp has yet to begin, but Schiano has proven to be the system-oriented stickler for the rules who seems to be the opposite of Morris.

Schiano acknowledged a report by Sports Illustrated’s Peter King that he insists that meeting rooms be kept at a specific temperature. Schiano told NFL.com’s Albert Breer, “Those are the details most people don’t tend to. I don’t know if I put more on that than anyone else, but I make sure we’re thorough. You can (complain) about stuff when it doesn’t go right. Or you can get out in front of it.”

The control-freak tendencies are typical of college coaches moving to the NFL. But often, such attention on minutiae quickly grates on professional players and causes coaches to lose a locker room.

“It’s demanding, what we’re asking. It’s not easy, but it’s the best thing,” Schiano told Breer. “The buy-in has been great. They’ve been working incredibly hard…So far, the guys have been excellent. It was a change for them, but we didn’t just do it to do it. We explain to them the reasoning, and once they hear it, they get it. Hey, they want to win.”

The template for success for Schiano is New York Giants head coach Tom Coughlin, who has thrived in two pro stops after a college career at Boston College. Buccaneers offensive coordinator Mike Sullivan, a former Coughlin assistant, sees similarities between his old boss and his new one.

“Coach Schiano is in many ways similar to Coughlin, from the standpoint of very, very organized and detailed and things like discipline and structure and organization being at a premium,” Sullivan told Sirius XM radio, according to NFL.com.

“I think what a lot of folks can expect is just to see a team that’s going to be very disciplined and that’s going to be really focused on the type of preparation it takes to be at their best,” Sullivan continued.

The Coughlin template gives Buccaneers fans hope for Schiano’s success. However, the tale as old as time indicates that, perhaps, the Buccaneers will be looking for a player-friendly head coach not too far in the future.

It’s up to Schiano—not just his system, but his adaptability—to write his own story and become a structured success.

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