Todd Bowles On His SWEET Gameday Superstitions

Buccaneers head coach Todd Bowles stopped by The Rich Eisen Show and confessed something the Tampa Bay locker room may already know but the rest of football probably did not.

The man runs his game day on candy bars.

Rich asked the simple question. Are you superstitious?

Bowles did not hesitate.

"I am very superstitious on certain things."

The specifics came out fast. Pregame, every game, Bowles must have either a Nestle Crunch or a Kit Kat. That is the non-negotiable. Some kind of Chips Ahoy or comparable cookie situation is required the night before. Those are the food rituals.

Then come the seating rituals.

Bowles sits on the right side of the team bus, in the first seat, every single time. The only exception is when the Glazer family ownership group is on board. Then the head coach quietly relocates and finds another seat. He also makes sure the rest of his coaching staff sits in the same spots they sat in the previous week.

Break the seating chart. Lose the game. Get blamed.

"If somebody changes their seat or moves and we lose, I blame them."

Rich asked a logical follow-up. Do the Glazers know that is your seat? Bowles brushed it off. They do not need to know. They can sit wherever they want to sit.

The candy bar logistics turned out to require a dedicated supply chain. Bowles has a designated person on staff. Her name is Sarah. She is his assistant.

Sarah brings the candy bar to every game. She knows the rules. No candy bar is the equivalent of a black cat crossing the road.

Rich, sensing he was onto something, asked the inevitable follow-up. What happens when she does not have it?

Bowles answered with the calm logic of a man who has clearly thought this through. If the team wins on a candy-less day, he goes with it and skips the candy bar the following week. If the team loses, he blames Sarah.

The bit closed with Rich enjoying himself enormously. He told Bowles he loved learning all of this and pointed out the obvious through-line. The head coach of an NFL franchise eats like a five-year-old.

"You must be great on Halloween, man."

Bowles did not deny it. He looks forward to Halloween.

It is the kind of small confession that humanizes a head coach in a sport that usually demands stoicism. The 17-game season is long. The pressure is high. The locker room politics are real. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, a head coach who has been around the league as long as Bowles has is depending on Sarah to remember the Kit Kat.

That is the part that lands. Not the candy. The system. Bowles has built a personal pregame ritual that involves another human being doing a small specific thing every week, and the consequences of that small specific thing are baked into how the head coach mentally prepares to win football games.

It is the most Tampa Bay answer possible.