Ken Zampese is the OC

[McC]

(01-16-2016, 02:56 PM)Wes Mantooth Wrote: What you deem negativity others consider reality.  The least you can is allow others to have their own opinions.  There is no right way to be a fan.  And there is certainly isnt only two basic approaches to evaluating success either.

If you think this year was a success, good for you.  If you're perfectly happy with recent results, good for you.  If youre confident heading into next year, good for.  I dont, and I'm not.  

There's nothing inheritly negative about someone's personlity or thought process simply because they hold a negative opinion about a particular topic.  

Ir's pretty hard to judge a guy's ability to do a job without ever seeing him do it.  Condemning the choice at this point is just jumping to a conclusion based on nothing.

Seems to me you're ignoring a lot of great things that happened this year by out of hand dismissing it as a failure.

For one thing, the more the information comes out, the more it looks like the Bengals got absolutely jobbed out of that elusive playoff win.

But even ignoring that and sticking strictly to the reality of it, there's no ignoring the good things that came out of that night.  First and foremost, they stood toe to toe with those brawling, cheating assholes in black and piss and never once blinked.   That is a new development.

They made a 4th quarter comeback and had the lead near the end of a playoff game.  That's a new development.

And these developments are huge, way too huge to ignore.

The train is moving ahead.  Maybe it hasn't gotten all the way over the hill yet  and God knows, it's not moving at a fast enough pace for any of us but we are on the on the doorstep and when last year started, we weren't even in the yard yet, maybe not even on the street.

It's easy to look at just the big picture, but doing that is missing the truly important details.

Yes, we have that past staring us in the face and lots of people all over the world to keep it always fresh in our minds.  But to constantly focus on that robs one of the ability or inclination to recognize the legitimate reasons for optimism that are just as right in front of us as the negatives are right behind us.

Wishing for something that hasn't happened and probably won't gets you nowhere.