Todd Bowles is entering his fourth season at the helm of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and has never finished lower than first in the division.

It’s not because of his team’s total and utter dominance, but rather because of a weak NFC South. But Bowles seems to have gotten a little bit better each season and might’ve made a “breakthrough” finally.

Bowles has been oft-criticized for his what some perceive to be coaching failures like his end-of-game management and inability to use timeouts at the end of the first half and fourth quarter at times.

Bowles spoke with reporters at the league meeting in Palm Beach, Florida and indicated he went back after last and watched game film and saw how he coached certain situations. He had what he called a “coaching breakthrough.”

“So from the start of last season, the end of last season until now, I have been working on how we can tweak the defense and make the defense better,” Bowles said. “And what is it, March now? It wasn’t probably until last week where I finally had a breakthrough, because I’ve been racking my brain for months trying to go through a lot of things and talking to every coach, going over everything, seeing how we can get better.

“What can we tweak? What can we do? What do they see? What do we see?”

That’ll be good news for Bucs fans who have been critical of Bowles.

The team’s strength last season was its third-ranked offense. And while Bowles also serves as the team’s defensive coordinator, as the defense struggled, he was blamed. But now it seems he might have finally figured out what caused some of those struggles.

“It comes with plenty of film study, plenty of doodling on the board, watching things, plenty of what we have and you hold out a little bit to what we may get in the draft, but you got to go through all the scenarios in your head,” Bowles said.

“We’ve finally come up with something that we feel like is a successful formula for our defense going forward this year and tweaking a few things and I’m excited about that.”