[Goldenfleece]

I don't think the current time of hardship is because of short-sighted goals during the GSoT. In some ways, we have tried to build for the long-haul. We just failed spectacularly with some awful drafts. Vermeil left, taking his stabilizing presence with him, leaving the unbalanced Martz in charge. That might have continued to work reasonably well if the defense had held up, but then Lovie left town, leaving us with a bunch of players tailored to his scheme. It just got worse, because then we brought in possibly one of the worst defensive coordinators in team history, Larry Marmie. Now maybe the wound is still too fresh and I'm remembering him worse than he really was, but I do recall when Haslett came to town, he had trouble even figuring what kind of system Marmie was supposed to be running from the tape because everybody was so far out of position, it was hard to tell who was supposed to be where. Finally, the Martz era devolved into such a mess of threats and accusations and failures, the team decided to just reboot.

When we brought in Linehan, we weren't even trying to cling to GSOT glory. We could have brought in a long-time veteran coach to try to get back into the playoffs before it was too late. Instead we took a chance on a young offensive coordinator and pretty much blew up the defense to start from scratch.

I'd say almost the entire defense looks better than it did in the Martz days, for what that's worth.