12-12-2020, 01:09 PM
(12-12-2020, 10:07 AM)THE PISTONS Wrote: I feel like some people only watch the Bengals and dont see that other teams constantly have injuries too. We will never be totally healthy. No team will be.
Tomlin went 8-8 with no Roethlisberger. The Packers won a SB some years back missing like 8 or so starters.
So injuries to AJ Green and Jonah were excuses for failure last year, well they're back this year along with Burrow, Higgins, and a bunch of others. Some 8 new starting caliber players and we're still bad...and some posters think it's because of a couple key injuries.
I do follow the rest of the league (meticulously) and I would say it's more than a handful of injuries. It's precisely the fact that *everybody* we're devoting cap space to is either injured or suddenly stinks. I can't blame Taylor for the fact that AJ and Geno fell off a cliff. We spent like crazy to help him, but what happened to those "8 new starting caliber players?" Waynes down. Reader down. XSF down. Bynes stayed healthy but let's face it, he was a bridge to the new LBs, not a difference maker. I know many on this board will disagree with me about Dunlap, but I can't pin that on him either (I blame it entirely on Dunlap).
Folks will say Taylor's low winning % is unprecedented, but I would also say having literally every difference making player on your team either succumb to age or get hurt is unprecedented. You bring up Pittsburgh going 8-8. Yes, if we had Pittsburgh's defense and won 2 games I'd agree with you. But if Roethlisberger went down AND everybody they pay real NFL money to went down, yes, they'd be at the bottom of the division. And the money thing matters because when those guys go down, you're trying to beat other NFL teams without difference-making players. I don't remember who those players Green Bay lost were, but were they all injuries to the top of their roster?
There ARE some things I blame Taylor for: He over-exposed Burrow behind an OL that wasn't up to the task. I'd wager a lot that the front office is ripping him a new one for this as we speak. He hired unqualified coaches, and while this was partially because he was hired late in the cycle he has not (yet) replaced them. But the question for me isn't whether these were mistakes, but whether we can categorize them as the "growing pains" we knew we'd have when we hired a young, inexperienced head coach. The whole concept of "growing pain" is that you learn from them and get better as a result, and while I don't love Taylor (never have) I'm willing to see if he'll grow from them.
My usual disclaimer: I never wanted to hire Taylor because I didn't want these growing pains. But here we are going through them, and we might as well see what's one the other side. I'm not defending Taylor so much as I'm preaching patience. If he makes no changes to his staff this offseason (and definitely if his naive scheming gets Joe hurt again) I'll lose the last scraps of faith I have left in him. I'm not devoted to Taylor, just trying to point out that what he's had stacked against him is yes, far more than the typical injuries most teams go through.
