Week In Review: Bengals Hire Jay Gruden As The Team's Offensive Coordinator

I have no idea who is the longest-tenured, but it’s probably Brat. It’s very rare for an OC to last that long. But not so much because they tend to get fired quickly. That’s part of it, of course, but a huge chunk of it is that they also tend to get promoted quickly, to take over head coaching jobs either in the NFL or perhaps in college/UFL/etc.

I think that anonymous coach was making excuses for his own failures. It’s all about execution, yeah, he’s probably right about that. But he’s wrong at the same time because he ignores a far more critical detail. It’s not solely execution. It’s execution after you’ve come up with a superior plan than your opponent. That can be accomplished in basically two ways. You can scheme and formation your way into mismatches that can be taken advantage of. Or you can fool your opponent into thinking something else is coming first, then execute something they weren’t expecting. And anybody can do one or the other (or even both) IFF they have the brains to come up with proper schemes and gameplans.

Now as I did say, if you have no talent whatsoever at all, it’s another story. But nobody has pro-bowlers at every single offensive or defensive position. They just can’t. And barring completely incompetent drafting, everybody has at least some talent to work with. I remember back in the 90s when the Saints didn’t, and I’m sure some of you remember back in the 90s when the Bengals didn’t as well. That’s not realistically possible anymore absent gross mismanagement. And even at the absolute nadir of the last six years, we’ve never had no talent. At times sub-standard, yes, but none?, no. And plenty of other teams have made-do with sub-standard talent and at least accomplished something with it.

Sean Payton doesn’t really have THAT great of talent on the offensive side of his team. Oh he’s got talent, but it’s not like he’s got pro bowlers at every spot. He had three this year and one of them (Jahri Evans) was a bit of a stretch. He has Drew who is obviously very very good (whether you call him elite or not), and his two guards are clearly elite. But his tackles are not — one is crap and the other was playing hurt this year and looked like crap. Not one TE or WR made the pro-bowl or was even close to it (tho Colston should have been in 2009), and he couldn’t keep a RB healthy for love or money this year. But regardless, he didn’t have great talent this year, yet he still hasn’t had an offense ranked below #6 in yards in five years, and this year was his worst.

Bill Bellichick is much the same way. He’s got a great QB, (mostly) good OL (but not that great), good TEs and WRs but nobody truly elite (anymore, at least, tho Moss was clearly still that in 2007). But he still gets the job done. And he also needs a defense to get the job done as well. In 2008 (when Brady went down) their defense was pretty good, but not great, in part because of bad drafting for years. Same with 2009. People expected the same here in 2010, but he rebuilt that defense far faster than anybody expected and got the job done (at least until the playoffs). His success in 2010 and in 2008 — at least in my opinion — pretty much proves that his problems in Cleveland were far more a pretty strong lack of talent combined with a lack of experience on his part, rather than any sort of outright incompetence. And hey, maybe with a few years off and some learning from others who are better, Brat comes back somewhere and does a good job. It could happen. I figure it’s more likely that pigs fly, but it could happen.

Falcons are a slightly different situation. They have a really great TE, a very good RB, and a more-or-less elite WR, with a few supporting players (including the OL) that help out. Their QB is still decent, but he’s not elite. So in some ways it was actually easier for them to adjust when he went down, except that at the same time they also lost their star RB to injury that year as well, and at least one other WR (can’t remember off the top of my head if it was White or not). Yet they still adjusted anyway, they found a way to scheme to victory.

Dallas looks different on the surface, but when you really dig in it wasn’t. They had problems early in the year, yes, but one of those games they lost by pure fluke. The others, their defense was pathetic, giving up on average 31.3 points a game. So yeah Romo wasn’t exactly performing great and the OL wasn’t great either, but they still put up 24.5 points a game (if you ignore the GB outlier when they clearly had given up). Their problem wasn’t offense in this case, it was defense. And who was in charge of that defense again? Oh yeah, Wade Phillips, who got his butt canned after the GB debacle because it was clear his team had given up on him. And no matter how great or not great the former OC guy was or wasn’t, he came in and immediately turned the team around with two wins and a very close loss, and in those two wins his new DC also turned things around and gave up only 19.5 points a game… one of those games to a team they had given up 41 to only three weeks earlier. So in Dallas, once again it wasn’t talent that saved the day, it was motivation and adjustments to the schemes. And it was inspiration from their coaches, coaches they believed in, who both inspired them AND came up with schemes to hide their weaknesses and exploit any weaknesses they could find in their opponents.

Buffalo was in many ways far more proof than anything else. Yeah, they sucked, and they had a worse year than we did. But with that roster that was almost completely devoid of talent, they still found a way to scheme their way to four wins and a significant number of close losses. They FOUGHT all year long, because their coaches inspired them to do so. Brat didn’t do that for this team.

And fitzy did come very close to starting from day one for us. He first started in week four after all, and I’m pretty sure with a better OC we would have won that day. For that matter, I think we might well have won against Baltimore with a better OC as well, they weren’t THAT great that year. Now some of the next few games were against very tough opponents, but this was still the Mangini Jets at that point and Farve or no Farve we should have at least put up more of a fight there. That’s two, maybe three more wins right there. Add in Dallas and one more game somewhere (maybe Philly instead of a tie?) and we’d have been 8-8 instead of 4-11-1.

And had Brat found a way to accomplish that — or even 7-9 — he’d still be employed today, and he’d deserve to be.