11-02-2022, 07:53 AM
To me it's a bit of a chicken/egg scenario. Yes he did take us to the Super Bowl, but there is consideration for how much of that is on the DC... on Burrow.. on Chase etc. I don't think that's an unreasonable debate.
To really know who gets credited for what, we'd need access to the team which we as fans simply don't have. We're not in on comms during a drive or a training session etc, to know exactly what Zac or anybody's influence is. We can generally only work around interview snippets etc. So we can say 'well our scripted drives suck', but we ourselves don't know what Zac does on the fly to adapt as well. We either praise him or Burrow depending on our own bias.
My own opinion; I've seen a lot of things I feel have had the team poorly prepared this season. Some of the gameplanning seems way off at times. The pre-SB Zac seasons were not good. If he gets responsibility for taking us to the Super Bowl, he gets responsibility for the rest too. And by the numbers right now, our 'non-Super Bowl run' stats look pretty bad. Take out the last part of last season, and his record is awful in terms of W's and L's.
HOWEVER... there is no question that he was part of a Bengals unit that got us to within a minute of our first Lombardi. I know players won't out their coach while he's here, but I really don't doubt Burrow when he says about how happy he is ZT is our HC. I think Zac has built a really good culture here, and has a team that is really together. No divas, no guys talking out of line in interviews etc, nobody who is splintering the team when things are going wrong. You do sometimes hear those things from other teams.
Said in another thread a few days back about what a 'good character' team this seems to be. The days of Burfict/Pacman seem a long time ago when you look at our team right now. Zac deserves credit for building that. He deserves credit for the team going out in the offseason and clearly going all in to address their issues. It seemingly hasn't worked as we hoped, but the intention and effort was clearly there.
TL;DR - I don't think he's some all wonderful HC, and I think there are clear deficiencies personally, I think we should be a better team than we're showing. BUT he definitely deserves a lot of credit for what he's achieved/is achieving too. I do personally think that even if we 'stand still' in the offseason, this team will be more successful next year. Far more experienced franchises have struggled following a SB loss.
To really know who gets credited for what, we'd need access to the team which we as fans simply don't have. We're not in on comms during a drive or a training session etc, to know exactly what Zac or anybody's influence is. We can generally only work around interview snippets etc. So we can say 'well our scripted drives suck', but we ourselves don't know what Zac does on the fly to adapt as well. We either praise him or Burrow depending on our own bias.
My own opinion; I've seen a lot of things I feel have had the team poorly prepared this season. Some of the gameplanning seems way off at times. The pre-SB Zac seasons were not good. If he gets responsibility for taking us to the Super Bowl, he gets responsibility for the rest too. And by the numbers right now, our 'non-Super Bowl run' stats look pretty bad. Take out the last part of last season, and his record is awful in terms of W's and L's.
HOWEVER... there is no question that he was part of a Bengals unit that got us to within a minute of our first Lombardi. I know players won't out their coach while he's here, but I really don't doubt Burrow when he says about how happy he is ZT is our HC. I think Zac has built a really good culture here, and has a team that is really together. No divas, no guys talking out of line in interviews etc, nobody who is splintering the team when things are going wrong. You do sometimes hear those things from other teams.
Said in another thread a few days back about what a 'good character' team this seems to be. The days of Burfict/Pacman seem a long time ago when you look at our team right now. Zac deserves credit for building that. He deserves credit for the team going out in the offseason and clearly going all in to address their issues. It seemingly hasn't worked as we hoped, but the intention and effort was clearly there.
TL;DR - I don't think he's some all wonderful HC, and I think there are clear deficiencies personally, I think we should be a better team than we're showing. BUT he definitely deserves a lot of credit for what he's achieved/is achieving too. I do personally think that even if we 'stand still' in the offseason, this team will be more successful next year. Far more experienced franchises have struggled following a SB loss.
