I’m not saying he is bad or I don’t want him, but a lot of fans make it seem like it’s Johnson or bust. I mean yea the Lions offense is legit, but so is the Cowboys, the Dolphins, the 49ers and the eagles.
All this talk about “we won’t be able to find a good HC candidate.” I mean, no one really knows of any of these guys will be good. They all are offensive gurus. It just seems like you could put the names of all the OCs from all the best offenses in the NFL in a hat and draw a name out and you would have just as good chance as any one of them being a bust or being great.
I’m not entirely sure he is. The Lions are kicking ass but you could hardly say it’s because the playbook is innovative. They have the right guys to run a fairly conservative playbook really well. They’re doing the old stuff with passion and conviction, not reinventing the wheel.
Granted, there’s really something to that - OCs are responsible for the way the roster gets used offensively, at a minimum, so knowing what you’ve got and building an offense around it is a non-negligible skill. It’s something Reich transparently screwed up, and perhaps Brown had a role in it. Arthur Smith is getting heat for this right now in Atlanta, too. It’s easy to not really know what you’re working with.
But I’d say we actually have both problems right now. We can’t run the old plays and we can’t run the new ones. We’re badly-constructed, badly-utilized and badly-designed. Hard to beat. We’ll need somebody who has a vision for how this team could be fielded competitively with close to 80% of its roster as-is, using plays that said roster can execute well.