Hmmm...
otter said:
Saunders offense at its best, he's had fearless quarterbacks that would wait until the last second to get the ball off(Warner, Green). Warner wasn't a scrambler but would wait until the final second to get the ball off..Green buys time with his movement and he also will take a hit.
...now who was it who, it was said, waited too long and was too willing to take a hit to give his guys time to run the routes? Didn't we have a guy like that not too long ago? Hmmm...
Here's the bigger picture I've been mulling.
Gibb's goal here seems to be to NASCAR this thing, repeat what brought success for him there and, in my opinion, that is just not how football works.
For his race team, he got the best people; best mechanics, best crew chief, best this and that and that was his job, getting the people, giving them the tools, setting the goal and letting them do their job.
Football is not compartmentalized like that. Yes, a race team has to work 'together' in the sense that a great driver's got nothing with a mediocre engine or vice versa or if his tires don't get changed fast enough or correctly; you need it all BUT building that engine is physically separate and not dependent on the driver in any way until his part, driving, comes in, at which point the engine guys are spectators. Same thing in all areas; you can get your part right, mostly independent of the other areas.
Now, Brunell talks to some kid on the sideline, Bill Lazar, with Saunders upstairs, ostensibly in charge, with Gibbs looking like some master chef walking gingerly around a kitchen trying desperately to not interfere. Maybe Lazar is Gods gift to the position. Maybe Saunders has called the right play every time. Maybe Gibbs is doing a great job of not messing up the recipe. But is it just too much bureaucracy? Everything has to work, directly, together in football.
Who's in charge of the O line? The assistant head coach/offense/Saunders? Or assistant head coach/offense Bugel? Or offensive coordinator Breaux? Offensive assistant Burns? What's Gibbs role? Who answers to who? How many bosses could you have before you find it impossible to find out who you need to satisfy to even know if you're doing what that person, whomever it may be, wants you to do? And then coordinate with the other parts of the offense? Same thing on defense. At what point does excess = counterproductivity enter the equation?
What kind of halftime adjustments are going on? Who's doing them? Gibbs? Lazar? Al? Buges?
Gibbs magic in football was him working, first hand, with what he had and making adjustments based on that and being able to apply, first hand, his will to win. Would he have picked a John Riggins or a Joe Theismann or Russ Grimm? Or was part of the success that he was stuck with them, Riggo and Joe, had to make do? Was it a huge benefit to have Bobby Beathard in drafting and digging up free agents? Would Beathard have liked Portis who came from a system that has a very different O line and style than ours? Would he have seen Brunell still as a starter?
Would Beathard have picked Shawn Merriman over Carlos Rogers?
Ben Roethlisburger over Shawn Taylor?
It was well known back in the day in the papers, third hand comments and reading between the lines that Gibbs was usually at odds with Beathard and only really got his way once in awhile. Us old farts remember Gibbs big MUST HAVE guy,WR Walter Murry of Hawaii. Just look at our drafts with Beathard and then 1989 on after he'd left.
I have no doubt that Mark is doing exactly what Gibbs wants him to do; play very cautiously and it does and can work. Mark Brunell didn't make his rep doing that; he was a gunslinger, not a technician, so, I figure he's really struggling with this too. He keeps being told by Gibbs 'you're my guy' so, that means he's doing what Joe wants, yet, he can see more readily than anyone else that it, playing to not make mistakes, also has it's drawbacks.
Gibbs and his CEO style he's trying to adapt to a football team has him majorly invested in all his pieces, including Brunell. Well, all these pieces are not meshing and one more difference between cars and football; You can get better at racing every year and in every area because age and experience are accumulating assets. The shelf life in football is much, much shorter.
