TAMPA, Fla. -- Jim Caldwell’s job security is in question again, just like it has been almost every December he has been employed by the Detroit Lions. For the third straight season, Caldwell enters the final stretch being asked whether he’ll be around for the following season.

Caldwell has always handled questions about his contract status well. He either brushes it off, like he did Sunday by saying, “It’s coaching. That’s the way it is.” Or he says he’s never really worried about it, which is how he has answered similar lines of questioning in the past. It has been brought up regularly since the middle of 2015, when his team started 0-5.

Now, in Caldwell’s fourth season, with the Lions needing to win out and get some help from other teams in order to reach the playoffs, there's even more scrutiny -- in part because there’s more of a body of work to look at.

Prior to Sunday’s 24-21 win over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers -- a game in which the Lions almost blew a 14-point fourth-quarter lead -- the Lions had issues with starts in games. They didn’t have the correct number of players on the field in key defensive situations in losses to Minnesota and Baltimore. Caldwell took the blame for that; he will often take the blame for those gaffes, whether it is his fault or not. Those losses intensified his job scrutiny and perhaps lessened his job security.

“Coach Caldwell is a great coach, a great man, and he gets a lot of unfair criticism because of us,” Lions safety Quandre Diggs said. “We go out and do our job, and it wouldn’t be those questions about his job. A lot of that falls on our shoulders.

“He’s going to always take the blame, but it falls on our shoulders. We got to go out, and we got to play, and we got to compete, and we got to go out and play 60 minutes because that’s not his job, to get us to play 60 minutes.”

Except that it is. And playing 60 minutes is something the Lions have rarely done the past three seasons. There have been outliers: games at the New York Giants and Green Bay this season and at New Orleans last season. But for the most part, Detroit has played the same way, often needing comebacks to win at the end. Caldwell called thriving in close games a “hallmark” of his team and, really, his time with the Lions.

But that’s where Detroit has run into trouble, too, particularly this season, when the late-game comebacks either haven’t been fully finished (Atlanta, Carolina) or the Lions have put themselves in enough of a hole that the Matthew Stafford heroics were improbable at best (New Orleans, Minnesota, Baltimore).

It is part of why the Lions -- and Caldwell -- are in the situation they are now. It’s a place, job-security-wise, where the Lions have lived for three seasons.

When general manager Bob Quinn was hired after the 2015 season, he took a week to decide to retain Caldwell. Last season, when the Lions lost three straight games to close the regular season, it was leaked that Detroit would retain Caldwell for 2017 in the days leading up to the team’s wild-card playoff game against Seattle -- a game the Lions lost 26-6.

Then this season, the Lions started 2-0, and the day before a game against Atlanta, it leaked that Caldwell had signed an extension well before the season began and the team and coach declined to tell anyone about it. The news seemed to give Caldwell more security, at least until Sunday, when some of the parameters of the deal leaked, evaporating almost all of the security that it seemed he had.

Not that Caldwell would comment on it.

“We’ve never, never, ever, ever been in the practice of talking about contracts and anything of that nature,” Caldwell said. “And we’re certainly not going to start today.”

But it opened more pointed speculation about his future in Detroit and, specifically, what Caldwell might have to do to stick around for 2018. Quinn and Lions team president Rod Wood declined to stop to talk with reporters prior to Sunday’s game. They would have been asked about Caldwell’s status.

The only thing the Lions have control of when it comes to their future and that of their once-again-under-fire head coach is their ability to win the remaining games on their schedule: at home against Chicago, at Cincinnati and the season-finale against Green Bay.

If the Lions win out, they might make the playoffs, and they might save their coach’s job. But again, they need help.

“I would like to win out just so I could go to the playoffs. That would be the most important thing,” defensive tackle Akeem Spence said. “Like, I mean, next game. Next game. That’s our mentality: taking it one game at a time.”

It’s a cliché, for sure, but for the Lions -- and for Caldwell -- it is about all they can do right now to try to save their futures.