Coaches I Am Glad We Did Not Choose

[floydefisher]

Anthony Lynn should have remained as coach indefinitely. He's a leader of men.

You're kidding, right?

I still think Bienemy is going to be a really good coach somewhere. I suspect it's simply he lacks interview skills that he isn't hired.

As far as Urban Meyer is concerned, while I did think he would have been a bad hire, never in my wildest dreams did I even think he would flame out ala Bobby Petrino (look up why he was fired at Arkansas for details). Wow, just wow.

I'm glad we did get Staley though. So far, he's actually installed a spine in this team. Still needs some work, but really promising for the future (if the Spanos family doesn't get in the way).

[floydefisher]

I still think Bienemy's big problem is that no one wants the face of the franchise to be short and fat. It's not an impressive visual but has little or nothing to do with him as a coach.

You mean like Andy Reid?

[Steve]

Reid is tall and fat. And he was hired back when HC didn't spend much time on TV talking to reporters. He had an established track record long before he was KC head coach.

[Nunc Coepi]

I was definitely kidding when I said Anthony Lynn should have been allowed to coach the team forever. I disliked his hiring from day one.

As a novice head coach, Lynn announced that the "day of the pocket-passing quarterback is over." It was a barely veiled jab at Rivers. Then he didn't let Rivers attend LT's Hall of Fame ceremony. He should have respected the long-time team leader. Instead, he tried to push Rivers out the door.

He got what he wanted. Rivers left. Lynn's wet dream was to have Tyrod Taylor as his quarterback, and he got that, too. The fact that the Charger organization did so much to accommodate Lynn is proof that it has serious problems. The people who make decisions at the highest level don't care that much whether they win or lose.

No intelligent football person can seriously think Tyrod Taylor is a better qb than Rivers. Lynn did, so he is not an intelligent football person.
He is now the offensive coordinator for the Lions. At the end of the season, he will be gone. They've given him his walking papers.He is a small person who can't think outside the little boxes he creates. That's why he was a shitty coach and a shitty coordinator. Maybe he's qualified to teach running backs what they need to do to avoid fumbling.

[floydefisher]

I was definitely kidding when I said Anthony Lynn should have been allowed to coach the team forever. I disliked his hiring from day one.

As a novice head coach, Lynn announced that the "day of the pocket-passing quarterback is over." It was a barely veiled jab at Rivers. Then he didn't let Rivers attend LT's Hall of Fame ceremony. He should have respected the long-time team leader. Instead, he tried to push Rivers out the door.

He got what he wanted. Rivers left. Lynn's wet dream was to have Tyrod Taylor as his quarterback, and he got that, too. The fact that the Charger organization did so much to accommodate Lynn is proof that it has serious problems. The people who make decisions at the highest level don't care that much whether they win or lose.

No intelligent football person can seriously think Tyrod Taylor is a better qb than Rivers. Lynn did, so he is not an intelligent football person.
He is now the offensive coordinator for the Lions. At the end of the season, he will be gone. They've given him his walking papers.He is a small person who can't think outside the little boxes he creates. That's why he was a shitty coach and a shitty coordinator. Maybe he's qualified to teach running backs what they need to do to avoid fumbling.

Couldn't agree more. I used to refer to Lynn as 'Coach Chuck Knox', mostly because he sounded like a throwback to the 1970's with all the talk about 'ground and pound' football.

Yeah, you need to be able to run the football to win games, but it has to be a balanced attack. You can't just run the football all the time any more than you can just pass the football all of the time either.

If you look at every dynasty in pro football, every last one of them features a multi-faceted offensive attack.

Take Green Bay. Yeah, they ran the ball an awful lot with Taylor and Hornung. And if you stacked the box to stop the power sweep, they had a Hall of Fame QB in Bart Starr and some pretty good wideouts that made you pay for that mistake. Every single time.

Pittsburgh. Known for the running tandem of Harris and Bleier. And if you tried to stop it, they had a QB named Terry Bradshaw, and couple of wideouts named Swann and Stallworth that could wake you up real quick with some deep strikes.

San Francisco. They won a Super Bowl with an admittedly substandard ground game. Teams adjusted, and the next year the Niners missed the playoffs. So they adjusted and got some running backs named Wendell Tyler, and later Roger Craig, and started their real dynasty. Montana and Rice were the show, but if you tried to stop it their running backs would break off a long run to remind you there is more to the Niners than just a pretty passing attack.

Dallas. They also had a multi faceted attack in Aikman, Michael Irving, and a running back named Emmit Smith.

Even New England had a running attack to compliment Tom Brady. At one point they went away from that formula, won 18 straight games, then crashed and burned in the Super Bowl to a 9 in NY Giants team. Once the found their running game again, they were back winning more Super Bowls. The running game was always by committee, but it was still very effective.

I could go deeper into NFL history, and give you even more little gems like this, but I think i've already made my point.

Running and passing has always been the formula, regardless of the era.

[Steve]

I think a more consistent running game would make Herbert a lot more effective.

For a conventional QB, if you start getting a lot of 5 or 6 yard runs on 1st down, you get to take shots on 2nd down, because you have so many options for 3rd down. Even if you only get 3 or 4, you still are on schedule to get a 1st down, so the play calling is pretty open.

Herbert lets us forget that we are often really bad on 1st and 2nd downs. He converts a ton of 2nd/3rd and longs. I think a lot of Lombardi's play-calling woes are about trying to find better ways to stay on schedule, keep the pass rush off of Herbert and that opens up some of shots down the field.

The other thing a running game does is gives you a 5-minute offense. 5 minutes to go with a lead, how do you kill the clock to get out of the game. Ideally, you want to finish each drive off with a TD, that is a given. But if you can score a TD AND run off most of the time off the clock, you are going to win a lot of games. That is a big part of why I think so many teams are not able to finish games. They either turtle up, and JUST run the ball, or they JUST try to get chunk plays, and even if they do score, leave the other team enough time to match them, and finish them off in the end. The ideal 5-minute O would be a strong mix of run and pass, then I think most defenses would throw their hands up in frustration.