bmags

Pretty sure Belicheck is heavily involved in defensive game planning, and you did not include Shanahan who is definitley one of the best coaches in the league given his qb play.

Are they still talking daily? I haven't seen any news today.

He does have a good rep as a teacher, may be part of a player development side Poles wanted vs just focusing on leadership or Xs and Os.

Last thoughts - for once I wanted more certainty and give up a bag to get a top coach. BUT, we've talked a lot about how the bears go from one extreme to the other. Sleepy angelo to fiery, "new school" Emery. Gave Emery keys to castle and he wiles out with Trestman, hire new GM and force an experience defensive coach at multiple stops. Then go to offensive guru. They didn't let Poles age or "one org" background stop them on Poles, and Poles didn't care about what the bears have done, apparenlty, in Eberflus. But yeah, we have no idea. But he was a really good coach at Mizzou. Pinkel made his hay drafting 3 stars and putting muscle and coaching in them. He made Sean Weatherspoon, and we had a good big 12 defense, that 2007 defense was actually good. It just wasn't good enough to beat teams with 5 star offensive lineman up and down like Oklahoma/Alabama etc. Not a lot of Mizzou offensive guys to dig into. But Dave Yost was OC and went on to success at Utah State, but was fired from Texas Tech recently and signed on at FIU. I wouldn't recommend him for fields lol.

The good about eberflus is while he has a marinelli background, he made a lot of changes consistently to his Defense. Again - would love to see if he can nab Patrick Graham for defense. For offense, boy. Offensively, funny stuff, he was on Eric Mangini's cleveland browns that had Daboll as OC. In Dallas, I don't see any coaches I'd like. Seriously, please no Derek Dooley as OC. Kill me. (he was with eberflus in Dallas and became OC at Mizzou) Indy? Well they just lost Sirianni. So I don't know who he's bringing. Please be good.

I'm very surprised. I was good with Quinn, but was trying to face the issues he had as HC that suck like horrible game management. But I knew he'd bring a great staff in. But Eberflus? Loved what the Indy writers said about him, and I think what we WILL get is a disciplined team with him. That's big but I'd still wish we'd have looked into Demeco ryans, love how he's made a team that can't play Man work out so well, that's great coaching. Eberflus is 51, he's been on 3 NFL staffs. So he should have a good network. But this will all come down to staff. This coaching cycle sucked. We obviously hope this is a mcdermott, but we keep missing out on the can't miss coaches. I really wish we had guys offensively from the Shanahan tree, but they are so picked over now. We are looking at copies of copies. May as well see if we can find a guy to start something new. Super, super high variance. I wonder if there are any college coordinators that would work here.

Obviously, M-I-Z

So Ben R officially retired. Sean Payton going to TV. Tom Brady up in the air. Who knows if that will lead to Arians to retire again. Quite a passing of the baton moment. With McVay vs. Shanahan, the Allen vs. Mahomes matches, and Burrow-Chase it seems like it won't skip a beat (vs if this happened all at once with them all joining Manning out the door)

Yeah. Im totally with Leftwich here, why would you sign on long term with the guy who blamed everything on Harbaugh and then signed Jim Tomasulo and Chip Kellys 1 year tenures, but it’s amazing to me he is doing this as a relatively new HC candidate. (it makes me like him more tbh)

Just saw a RT I know can’t find that the holdup with Leftwich in Jax is he wants Baalke out and Adrian Wilson in. That’s hilarious to me, how are those convos happening?

Hackett to DEN

You can tell Poles is actually running this process now because nobody knows what is going on. Personally While timing is now longer optimal I’d really like Demeco Ryans to enter the convo

Obviously it's not like any of this is unreasonable, but it's also like it's written by a bot. Anyway it's been getting shared a lot because he's the only person acting like there is stuff to say and it was annoying to me.

These jordan schultz report tweets seem like such B.S.

I think Leftwich will be a great head coach but I think the staff concerns are super real, especially with 9 head coaches being hired and having such limited contacts, he is going to have a really tough time. He may be better off becoming Arians heir apparent and getting that Dennis Allen like boost. But you never know if you'll get another shot so I'm sure he'l probably jump to JAX or here if asked.

Yeah, I can't really get behind him. There is a writer at WCG with a full throated support of him which was impressive. But I went back and was reading on "in the moment" stuff from his time in Detroit. He actually had a lot of turmoil with his offensive coordinators. Joe Lombardi sucked, and still sucks -bad hire by staley, Cooter saw success, but is insane and also couldn't run the ball, they were a terrible running team. Stafford did become much better with turnovers, just like flacco under him. But they were in the back half of offense for 3 out of his 4 years. I'm out.

If Caldwell is here 3 years and Fields is awesome under him, I don't feel like it's a problem. If he's just Cutler level or worse, then it's an issue.

I really liked Desai, I don't think anyone could have done much more than him with that defense other than Belicheck. But if you did get Caldwell, I would be pumped if he could get Patrick Graham from the Giants. But Desai and Graham are similar. Heres my baseline for Desai that's important to note: The bears had awful pass defense, but I'm pretty sure we are going to look back at our 2021 cornerbacks the way we did at the 2017 receiver corps. Such horrible depth. Good things he did: - Can't find it, but saw that he had either the most or second-most "disguised coverages", when you have kindle vildor, best you can do is disguise heavily - While this could lead to being burned a lot, I fully believe that led to more of the pressures. He bought just enough time to help his line get home, but if they didn't it was probably a touchdown unfortunately. - Thomas Graham Jr looked awful in preseason then looked like a real cornerback at the end of the year. Trevis Gipson leaped this year. I think he may be good at developing talent. I still wouldn't do Caldwell though. I came here actually to post this, because I was excited by it: The concern I bought into with Leftwich is the guy will have the same issue Nagy did - he has only worked under Arians. He won't have a staff. That's where I wonder if he and Poles hit it off if they can leverage the Trace Armstrong network of coaches, work on getting a vet DC and strong veteran offensive coach like a Bevell to help. Nagy when supported by an amazing D coach damn near worked. Staff is a big part of this, and Quinn and Caldwell would bring it. It's tough man, not a great set of coaching candidates.

man. If you would have told me 10 years ago I'd enjoy Mully and Haugh (I'm aware they didn't exist yet as a tandem) much, much more than Dan Bernstein I'd have laughed in your face but man he has become such a miserable listen. It doesn't even feel like he has any actual expertise anymore, he always seems to just be poking around his guests asking "how should I be mad about this, clearly its bad, tell me how its bad" and then railing against it.

I think you could probably do something with DVOA rankings and expected wins. I know the 2020 Falcons (which he was fired mid season) had one of the best DVOA rankings of a 4-12 team behind only a Jim Schwartz lions team. Performance wise it was hard to want quinn, this is more offloading my preferences to this hive NFL mind that all seem to really like Dan Quinn as a head coach. His defensive talent really was atrocious, and was only held together when Keanu Neal, Jones and Jarrett were healthy. They regressed to 30th this year, so it wasn't that group underperforming. But ...everyone in the league just talks about how players love to play for him and coaches love to coach for him. Is this just Jack Del Rio pt. deux? I don't know, you have to give Quinn horses, clearly. But it was a good sign that he immediately got back and formed a top defense.

I like that Poles has representation (repp'd by Athletes First, which is where Trace Armstrong leads the coaching side). That should lead to some additional contacts or should mean he had some pretty good info coming his way. I wish there was a place that rostered all of the reps for these guys. Flores is with Select and Daboll is with PSR (who also reps Schoen). I guess it's not common for GMs to have representation (Pace didn't), so maybe that adds a layer of research for him.

Did the Angels have a better decade than the Astros?

Um, no. We both feel like George is a bad owner of a football team but want a great football team. I think your solution of having George try to implement a much more complex structure where he decentralizes power across the organization and hires multiple people is going to be less likely to be successful than just hiring one person and getting out of the way. Pair a young GM with a veteran football mind they can lean off of? Congratulations, you have created Ryan Pace and John Fox. The Ravens set-up is possible because they had the best executive of his era. The Bears can't recreate having Ozzie newsome (though rumor is they tried)! I'm sure if the Bears installed a long-time, experienced GM with unquestioned credentials as president on top of this hire we would have all applauded George for installing Bill Polian as President. Your own scenario concludes that people have trouble disagreeing with the ultimate decisionmaker, but want a GM that can relay ideas off of a President who controls his employment. That just makes the President the new GM and the GM the assistant GM. It's just a people problem. If you get an amazing coach like Payton, he can be given personnel power and your structure of a young GM with someone to relay ideas off of works. But if you force a coach on him like John Fox, the structure is a problem. But bringing in experienced people isn't a bad thing, it's just the idea of putting a position over the GM I dislike. You could add in Scott Pioli or Bill Polian as a senior consultant and it gets you what you want. Put him above Poles and it's bad. Poles should have structural decisionmaking power over those people. Ultimately it's George's fault that he sicced Fox on Pace to start, but it's Pace's fault his inner circle was a mediocre inner circle. By accounts of those whove talked to him, Poles wants to know everything and talk to everyone. Pace thought he knew everything because he knew Drew Brees. Hopefully that works with Poles, or it leads to analysis paralysis and weak decisionmaking. We'll see.

Also weird to me is this NYG search. Starting to feel like Daboll isn’t the shoe-in it seemed. And if Schoen doesn’t hire him that’s uh…interesting.