TAMPA, Fla. -- Tampa Bay Buccaneers head coach Dirk Koetter admitted Monday that he was second-guessing himself for not calling timeout on the final drive of Sunday's 37-32 loss to the Rams, a decision that would have likely given the Bucs another shot at the end zone.

"Of course, of course," Koetter said Monday. "No one second-guesses my calls more than I do."

The Bucs had just come back from a 1 hour, 9 minute weather delay and made a critical stop on third-and-11 to get the ball back at the Tampa Bay 44 with 1:42 to go. They had two timeouts left when the drive began and still had one that went unused when the game ended.

On second-and-10, with 49 seconds remaining, running back Charles Sims caught a short pass and ran it 12 yards to get the first down at the Rams' 15 yard line. Sims was brought down in bounds, so the clock was still running. By the time the ball was snapped on the next play, the clock was down to 26 seconds -- exactly 23 seconds went by.

"Charles absolutely does the right thing by going for yardage right there," Koetter said. "He is so close to pulling out of that tackle and we’ve got [wide receiver Vincent Jackson] and [tight end Cameron Brate] ahead of him with one guy left. He pulls out of that last tackle, he’s going to score."

Instead, Koetter opted to keep going because he wanted to run the next play out of no-huddle, something the offense opts to do when it wants to keep the opposing defense from huddling and substituting, and has experienced great success with. Koetter acknowledged that he was told by Andrew Weidinger, the team's game-management coach, to call timeout.

"He was telling me, 'Timeout, timeout, timeout.' That’s 100 percent me," Koetter said, admitting that the team was also slower getting up than usual in no-huddle, which cost about three or four extra seconds. Koetter thought the next play, which resulted in an incompletion to Jackson, had a chance to be the game-winner.

He also knew that the two following plays would result in quarterback Jameis Winston being under duress, so he wanted his quarterback to have the time to check down and to use timeouts then.

"When you go back and say, 'Would’ve, could’ve, should’ve,' of course you can second-guess any call that doesn’t work," Koetter said. "I beat myself up over that kind of stuff more than anyone else ever will, but when you’re going in the spur of the moment and you have just a couple of seconds to make [a decision] and I knew exactly why we were doing it."

Players admitted that they were surprised Koetter didn't call timeout after Sims' play, and considering that the team had just come back from such a lengthy weather delay, they might not have been in their usual rhythm.

"I felt like we wasted too much time, playing out the clock," said right tackle Demar Dotson who, like many of his teammates, believed that if the defense got them the ball back, they would score and win the game. "I thought we were gonna call a timeout but we didn't. I guess Coach didn't want to mess up the momentum we [were] having, but I thought we [were] gonna call timeout. [Those] were a lot of precious seconds that were wasted away."

Brate was also surprised. "I know we had two timeouts. In retrospect, maybe we could have called 'timeout' at some point there. Regardless, we still had the ball at the 15 yard line," Brate said, pointing out that they had several chances to score after that. "Unfortunately we didn't make a play."