Agreed. Not only that, but a lot of those coaches are responsible for coaching up draft picks, and it seems fair to wonder how much the new coaches are lacking. Another reason I'd run it back with Belichick, -but- hire the coaches Bill O'Brien wants for HIS system so he can coach up the talent his way.
Who was fired after one season as the OC of Miami in '19. I'd take Josh or BoB (2 of the 3 coordinators - after O'Shea left with Flores) over him 8 days a week.
Jonnu Smith played over 4th overall pick Kyle Pitts much of this year (which basically no one thought was any sort of Cole Strange reach). It wasn't the signing that sucked.
Yeah while there has been significant brain drain, O'Shea is not a good example IMO. The Pats had an opening at OC in 2022 and chose Matt Patricia, when it would have been a promotion for O'Shea from his role as WR coach / passing game coordinator in Cleveland. The fact that they gave the job to Patricia over O'Shea speaks volumes IMO considering BB had significant experience with both, and O'Shea had something like 15 years of experience on offense at that time. He joined the Patriots in 2009, so he was here for like 10 years. It's not like BB barely knew him.
Fit didn't work really. The staff seemed to think they could get one of the two guys to a higher level of blocking.... didn't work so they couldn't play together. Also didn't help that I think Mac is not very good at getting the ball to guys in ways that let them get YAC (too slow to decide, too slow on the throw, etc.) and Smith does his best work with the ball in his hands rather than running routes.
Everyone is talking about QB like it's this thing that happened to the Pats and there was nothing they could do. The QB was bad, so everyone is absolved. What can you do?
I agree, but the argument seems to be that the only way to learn that Mac wasn’t the guy was to let him play a ton without a viable backup. The Pats would have been a playoff team with an average QB but didn’t get one because they had to confirm Mac wasn’t one, I guess.
Please don't use Arthur Smith's usage of players over other players as an example as to why Jonnu is good.
Because if you're going to give up on a 1st round pick in his 3rd year, you have better be damn sure he can't play. And they made sure of it. They gave him tons of chances, despite bad game after bad game. Eventually he proved to the satisfaction of all that he couldn't play.
No way am I going to defend the MP move. I can't run away from that one.
Because there is more value in a full year of evaluation on your 1st round QB than there is in wining 2 more games? And there were no really viable options that made them a contender, the Patriots are/were still in a rebuild despite what Kraft may have wanted to believe, the team had stripped down the number of long term deals, was rebuilding the line on the fly, etc. I'd also say that Zappe falling apart in camp surprised them likely, he looked competent last year, not good, not high upside but competent.
Asked and answered at least a dozen times.
I think we are saying the same thing. BB did not view O'Shea as an asset.
Throwing away a year doesn't have value when it was clear Mac wasn't on the edge of greatness. Weak arm, bad leader, but he's also really really slow too. His peak is literally game manager. When you have that, you try to have a backup plan.
I mean, I don't get your argument? You say "playoff team with an average QB".... maybe? Even if that is true, they had no avenue to an average QB other than the hope Mac developed, because none of the available options were average QBs.
I don't know where you are going with this. Yes, the Pats are a playoff team with an average QB. They thought that Mac could be at least an average QB. He started out average and then declined steadily over the course of the season to the point where he got benched. They had to figure out if it was a slump or terminal to his career.
Both to help Mac’s development and to put the team in a place for success, I think the better backup choice was a seasoned vet instead of a young red ass.
I mean, if he's that unstrung by a young QB with him in the coaches' room, he never had the mental fortitude to succeed in this league anyway.
Sure, if you see Macs failure as pre-ordained then it’s just arraignment of deck chairs for a couple years anyway.
I'd at least undertake a process to evaluate who's out there for possible OCs. BOB hasn't done much this year. That said, he was good with a young Watson. To me you look comprehensively at the offensive side of the ball. It's all linked (QB, QB coach, OC, OL, OL coach). All are on the table.
I guess we can just keep throwing around the bolded here because there's no way to prove otherwise. Convenient for all the "it's all on Mac" folks.
Except for the fact that the guys they picked up weren't even valuable to their former teams.
Average QB play, not even "good", but average play wins them the NYG, IND and Chargers games. It might well win them the LV and WAS games.
Sure, I'll take quality tackle play over the backup qb if I have to choose. Was that a zero sum salary cap game I missed though? Maybe separate thread, but Hoyer made ~1m in '22 and I thought BB basically dropped him for being 'team Mac' during Patricia-gate.
I mean in what sense? Both those guys started a significant number of games for their former teams just the year before. I get it, didn't work out therefore must have been bad, but that's not really how FA works, every team has an amount they can/will spend for backup/rotation guys.
Anyone who is actually good costs more, Hoyer made $4M two years ago, and $4.5M this year with LV and his buddy Josh. Hoyer got dropped because they had Zappe who was better and made less money. Hoyer has been beyond washed for years.
If all one score games (wins and loses) are reversed, this team sits at 8-8. An average QB has us on the cusp of the playoffs.
Agreed with all of this. The only thing I do wonder about is if some of those teams knew we had average QB play if they approach the game differently with their own offense, and in turn put up more points. But outside of that I do think middle of the road QBing has Pats in, or at least fighting for, a playoff spot.
In the sense that Reiff was benched down the stretch for a bad Bears team and Anderson only started 7 games for a bad Broncos team. Neither were particularly good last year yet they were supposed to be the answer for us.
What if you reverse every one score team for every team in the league, what then?
I mean they weren't supposed to be the answer, they were supposed to be what they were for other teams, affordable guys who can and have started NFL games when needed. If we got the level of play they were at in 2022 out of them this year probably looks quite different on the line at least.
I legit thought the Reiff timeline was the opposite so that's my bad. Thanks for setting me straight on that part.
You, incredibly, have an answer to everything as to why the Pats have been smart with their offensive plan this year.
I get that day-drunk uncle calling WEEI is your schitck, but I implore you to read the posts, and perhaps think about process rather than results. I said that they should in fact go for the approach that let them either be good or if it failed be bad. That's what they did. They put Mac in the best spot they could, with the understanding that if he failed the team would be bad and they could go get his replacement. Sure, Bill could have pulled a Mickey Loomis, extended a bunch of mediocre guys to free up cap space, signed Brissett for $9M and told him it was an open competition (though maybe not, there are owner politics involved any time you bench a recent 1st round QB that the owner likes), overpaid a bunch of mediocre free agents, fucked the cap next year and won 7-9 games maybe? What is the point of that? Now some GMs do it because they are more interested in keeping their jobs than the long term success of the franchise, but that's not something you should want out of your GM/Coach.
If the results were lousy on offense for four straight years, including the worst offense in the NFL in 2023, I personally would begin to question the process.
Well, for one, it's the last 2 years that the team has missed the playoffs, and 2020 was a don't-care CoVid season. So it's really the poor performance in 2022/23 seasons that we care about.
Has anyone said he's not? I certainly haven't. I've noted that there are things he's done well and things he's done poorly. Some of the results have been because of his failures, some have been bad luck. I am looking at process and decisions based on whether they were well supported and whether you would expect a new GM/Coach to generally do better or worse than Bill. The whole point of making forward looking decisions is to determine what things did and didn't work, why the decisions were made, what the other options are, how the success or failure rates of those decisions compare with other people in the area, etc.
“There’s no medals for trying. This isn’t like eighth grade where everybody gets a trophy. We are in a professional sport, and it is competitive to win. That’s what we do.”
Some of your analysis seems to boil down to, "Everyone else would make the same decision" or "The chalk at the time was" or "Every other team has these issues..." etc.
I get that argument, my point when I say that is... there are things Bill does well, I have noted them many times. I've generally argued that Bill is an elite coach and a league average GM. And for some of these things, like Mac (who I was not a big fan of coming into the draft as my posts show), that's one where you need a QB, I do think every GM takes Mac there, because the reward upside is so high, and the other options are so bad, and honestly I think with Mac, it's hard to parse responsibility, because at some point it comes down to the player. But for Mac, I don't think there really even is anything to go with there. Same way while I think Joe Douglas made a mistake taking Zach Wilson #2 (I would have taken Fields) I recognize that he had to take a QB there, and it turned out that it was a 1 QB draft, but he still made the right choice taking a QB, now with that we can parse why he took Wilson over Fields, what that says for future picks, but with Mac.... he was what was there, so there is less to parse, because Bill wasn't sitting at 15 with a choice between multiple potential NFL QBs, he was sitting at 15 with the choice between a guy who had the skills to maybe be a good NFL QB, and going into the season with Cam Newton. It was a good choice, the team was better with Mac (and all the FA signigns than with Cam and made the playoffs). Now I DO think there is plenty to be argued about Patricia... I get why he did it, I also think it was a bad move, and that it showed some real concerns that he was not as willing to go outside his comfort zone.
