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.

I pounded the table for us to make a small move up and get AR15. I like offenses built around credible dual-threats with cannon arms. Felt like our personnel could accommodate that pretty well - it’s a good fit for power run blocking, which we knew we could do after last year, and if you can buy time in the pocket and fire a huge throw, you’re ready for DJ to break one tackle and get a TD.

But we have Bryce now at great cost and I’m basically happy with him under the circumstances. Maybe I’d take Stroud but I’m actually pretty sold on the choice. It’s just literally everything else that’s wrong.

Well, I think they’re real big on the football industry and the ebbs and flows of the league, and they’re real big on advanced analytics and how it reveals what teams are good at and bad at, but they’re considerably weaker at just seeing film and judging the level and style of play.

Man, I like the Ringer a lot usually - they’re quite funny and the analysis is usually really good. But Ben Solak seems to have decided quite a while ago to take the most boring possible tack on evaluating Bryce - “his size makes it difficult for him to play QB!” - and that thinking has infected Ruiz and, apparently, Princiotti. It’s naive. You cannot grade this dude on EPA alone right now and you certainly can’t retrofit a narrative that he’s “objectively bad” because he’s the “smallest quarterback in the NFL” onto that stat alone without considering other statistical metrics (he’s what, fourth in the league on accuracy in tight windows?) He excels at and his overall environment. They never once mention receiver play or offensive line play in this article about how distressed and asset we are.

Anyways - I take no issue with the rest of this. David Tepper is the reason this is happening and they, as the kids say, read him for filth. But I think they move the needle of blame considerably off of Frank and onto Bryce and I just cannot get down with that.

An NFL team is a money printing machine. The earnings floor is way too high to induce anyone to quit. Basically the only way to lose money on an NFL team is to do what David Tepper has done, just more aggressively: giant guaranteed contracts and an itchy trigger finger. But you’d have to hand out $27M/4y years guaranteed to everyone from the HC to the groundskeeper to bankrupt David Tepper. And even if he ran dry, he’s a Wall Street chump - he’d just sell it to a Chinese private equity group who’d strip it down to the frame to show profitability and sell it again.

We’re stuck with him. Our only hope is that he decides this shit is too much of a headache and hires a president (other than his fuckin’ wife) to run it for him and they just give him the checks.

There are other problems, but Reich is 100% the biggest.

Does everything magically improve within this season? Hell nah. The playbook is what it is, the players don’t know any others. But the reason we’re in this mess is 90% Reich failing to design for the team he’d been tapped to lead.

I’d be kinda interested in Slowik. He’s clearly got things working quickly in Houston and that’s a skill we’re gonna need in spades.

Would that off-target percentage include deliberate throwaways, perchance?

Develop the rookie, with the caveat that there is such a thing as damage - mental and physical - that doesn’t get better in one offseason. Sam Darnold is far from a good QB, but a big issue is that the Jets broke him and then rebroke him before he had a chance to fully heal. We can’t allow THAT to happen.

I agree Zavala is not currently the answer, but some of y’all are getting a little out of hand begging for a Day 3 left guard who’s a rookie on a shaky-as-shit OL to get cut after his first year.

It speaks to a fundamental misanlalysis and if I’m running this team, I see it as all the evidence I need that Frank Reich has no eye for the game. Why would I ever trust him to build a staff? It’s all about finding the ideas that work and making them gel together.

Let’s say next year, Thomas Brown or Ejiro Evero get hired elsewhere. Frank is now in charge of finding a new coordinator, integrating their ideas into his “scheme” - what little scheme exists - and making sure his players can grasp it and execute it. How do we think that’s likely to go?

My postgame reaction to every 2023 game.

That is a raggedy lookin’ jungle cat for certain.

Chill out dude. It’s just the title of the video.

I’m being biased because this is the only Panthers game I’ve been to in person, but I saw the Kyle Allen-helmed team in 2019 play the Texans in the Houston and saw both McCaffrey stretch out like 8 feet long in midair to catch an errant pass and Kyle duck underneath a JJ Watt that was soaring at him to run for a first. That was special despite not having Cam.

I don’t think he quite deserves that. There was a certain point I was unwilling to treat Matt Rhule with any dignity but I don’t feel the same animus towards Frank. I just don’t want him running this franchise.

Now that it’s virtually in the bag, I kinda feel bad for the guy. Homecoming story, seems really sincere about the way he cares for his players and staff, I’ve always liked the candor he displays towards his past coaching mistakes.

I wish he could have avoided repeating them.

Just in time for him to get used to a new roommate on his right-hand side. /s

Playing with Zavala again about to make this dude regress to kindergarten.

Frank Reich and Josh McCown were both career backups. Jim Harbaugh was a middling signal caller who got demoted to backup. I really don’t think it’s a knock against them - you can know how to play the game on paper much better than you can actually play it.

My real question with DJ is: could he run these routes well? And I think the answer is… basically no. Like, he’d probably run a curl better than anybody still on the roster, but could he get plus yardage out of one? Could he go zero-to-sixty to get some YAC after coming to a complete stop to make a catch? Could he hit all the landmarks at exactly the right moment, considering he was never the world’s best route runner?

I’m not so sure.