I have the privilege of being a high school coach. I've been a part of some excellent teams and have also coached some teams who were not sucessful. Certainly, there are elements to coaching high school that are very different from being a professional coach, but at the end of the day coaching is coaching. You do the very best job you can to bring guys together and win games. Coaching is teaching. Coaching is about adjustments. Coaching is about recognizing talent. My observations lead me to believe Spags is a good defensive coordinator and a guy who has his team playing hard most of the time despite the futility, and that is a tribute to him. But where he and the rest of the staff come up woefully short is in the area of game planning and in-game adjustments and utilizing his personnel properly.
It is absolutely critical that you adjust your game plan and adjust your playcalling to fit the skill sets of those who are playing. If I have a poor offensive team in baseball, I am going to play small ball- bunt, steal, hit and run- do everything I can do to generate offense and put pressure on the defense. If I have a slow basketball team, I am going to slow the game down- not get into a run and gun contest with my opponent. And if I have one of the best backs in football, I'm sure as hell not going to spread him out, completely neutralize him and make him one-dimensional. I'm not going to isolate my franchise QB with the bad ankle with minimal protection and put him on an island. I'm going to recognize my offensive line stinks and call plays accordingly to maximize their ability to be successful.
To me, there is no better example of this than with Josh McDaniels. He appears incapable of preparing a sound offensive game plan which best utilizes the talents of those who are playing. Anyone can look good when you have Joe Montana or Dan Marino or Tom Brady. Show me what you can do with lesser talent. McDaniels has shown me he can't get the job done because his system doesn't fit the personnel he has. His look of exasperation on the sideline late in the Seattle game shows me he's frustrated and really has no clue how to get anything going. By extension, Bradford and the offense then lose confidence.
As much as I'd like Spags to be a part of the solution and as much as many of us don't want to see change here yet again, I think it's needed. It's just not working. The record speaks for itself. Performance wise, we're no better off than we were three years ago. We're not only unable to take advantage of a bad division, we're worse than these teams. And while some of these injuries are bad luck and can't be prevented, you'll never in a million years convince me that a lot of them (sprains, muscle injuries, etc ) aren't simply from a poor conditioning program and a lack of toughness. This team has been banged up from day 1 and there's NO WAY that should be the case.
I've said it before. Bring Jeff Fisher in...
-11-22-2011, 03:19 AM
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