Tampa, FL (SportsNetwork.com) – The Tampa Bay Buccaneers announced Thursday that Lovie Smith has been named the franchise’s new head coach.<\/p>\n
Smith, who agreed to a five-year contract, takes over for Greg Schiano, who was fired on Monday after a stormy two-year tenure. He returns to Tampa for the first time since 2000, his final season of five on then-head coach Tony Dungy’s staff.<\/p>\n
Smith will be formally introduced at a Monday press conference.<\/p>\n
“Today is an exciting day for the Buccaneer organization, and the entire Tampa Bay community, as we welcome back Lovie Smith,” said Buccaneers co-chairman Bryan Glazer. “Lovie is an accomplished and very well respected head coach who has enjoyed success at every level of his 30-year career. We knew from the start of our search that he was the ideal man to lead this team into this new era of Buccaneer football.”<\/p>\n
The 55-year-old native of Texas and Tulsa product spent nine seasons as head coach with the Chicago Bears, going 81-63 in the regular season and 3-3 in the postseason.<\/p>\n
Included in those totals are four 10-win seasons, three NFC North division titles and three playoff appearances, culminating in a loss to Indianapolis in Super Bowl XLI.<\/p>\n
Tampa Bay, which earned seven postseason berths and won a Super Bowl from 1997 to 2007, hasn’t seen playoff action since then, winning as many as nine games only twice (2008, 2010).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Tampa, FL (SportsNetwork.com) – The Tampa Bay Buccaneers announced Thursday that Lovie Smith has been named the franchise’s new head coach. Smith, who agreed to a five-year contract, takes over for Greg Schiano, who was fired on Monday after a stormy two-year tenure. He returns to Tampa for the first time since 2000, his final […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[68,67,66],"class_list":["post-12282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nfl","tag-buccaneers","tag-tampa-bay","tag-tampa-bay-buccaneers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12282","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12282"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12282\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12288,"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12282\/revisions\/12288"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}