Todd Bowles Handled Odd Question About Playing Outside in Detroit Perfectly

The Tampa Bay Buccaneers took down the Phildelphia Eagles on Monday to advance to the divisional round of the 2023 NFL playoffs and will play the Detroit Lions at Ford Field on Sunday afternoon. There are lots of great angles and storylines to cover on this Bucs team, one many left for dead after Tom Brady's retirement. But Baker Mayfield's will to win combined with a solid defense and a weak division allowed the Bucs to not only win a decent amount of games but also to host a playoff game. Then the luck of the draw kicked in and they got the most broken team in football to come to town. Now they're one win away from another NFC Championship Game.

Instead of covering any of that, the story of the week so far involves a question head coach Todd Bowles received during a press conference on Tuesday. A reporter (who has remained unidentified) asked Bowles how he was planning for his team to play in the cold Detroit weather-- something the coach does not have to worry about because the Lions have played in a dome for half a century.

An unfortunate error, to say the least.

This has gotten an incredible amount of attention because it is indeed a pretty significant mistake. More broadly, people nowadays have a love for dunking on the media at large to the point it's bordering on a fetish. Any clip that suggests reporters are stupid gets outsized attention. I wonder why that is.

Anyway, the reality is that the reporter, whoever they may be, is not an idiot who somehow ended up with a job against all odds. When any sports team gets to the postseason, journalists who are usually on other beats get sent to these sorts of press conferences to get a quote for the local paper or station they work for. That's especially the case nowadays given the Down Bad financial state of local media everywhere. That means they'll be asking questions outside of their area of expertise. You can pretty easily imagine a local arts reporter getting sent to the Bowles conference, connecting Detroit to cold weather, and figuring that's a good question to ask. It may seem shocking to us, people who watch every single sporting event, that this reporter didn't know the Lions play in a dome. But it is easy to forget that most people in this country do not follow sports like that. Not even the NFL, which is king.

All of this implicit understanding is clear in Bowles' tempered response. He could've gotten real snippy. Imagine the scathing look Bill Belichick would've given this reporter. Instead, Bowles simply points out the error, laughs uncomfortably in case he's getting Punk'd and Ashton Kutcher is about to pop up, and gives a fairly legitimate answer to an admittedly nonsensical question. He passed up the dunk, a pretty rare circumstance nowadays.

Good for Todd. And now that reporter will live forever with the knowledge that the Lions play in a dome.