12-22-2022, 11:40 AM
(12-21-2022, 11:00 AM)Wyche Wrote: Right and like I said, even Marvin was struggling with his own players. They were aging and had become soft.
It's tough to be in a work environment where you've experienced success as an individual and as a group when large-scale change and failure set in.
I don't like how Dunlap handled things, and I was certainly on the wrong side of the Anarumo debate (there's my crow-eating). That said, Carlos had been through one major climb out of the dumpster with this organization. He was by all accounts a big reason why they became an elite defensive unit. Before Dunalp, MJ, and Geno came along, this team absolutely failed at finding DL talent under Marvin. It's not a coincidence that success followed when they finally did figure it out.
On top of all that, that group went through a lot of disappointment in the postseason. I imagine it's tough to accept that kind of obvious finality to a body of work when you're a major part of it. Then comes the inevitable culture change, with you as an individual being about 10 years older and with diminished physical abilities. You have to prove yourself all over again to a staff that you have no relationship with. I can see where a guy might not view that as a place he wants to finish his career.
Hindsight makes it look like a bad decision to leave, but almost nobody except for maybe Sled thought that this team was going to a Super Bowl in Burrow's second year. I doubt that even he would have gone quite that far. Hell, nobody even believed that mid-2021 regular season.
At the end of the day, my view is that the organization should have cut bait with Dunlap before 2020. He was making a lot of money, and was not a part of the new administration. I feel like it's likely that they thought they were being loyal, even if Zac and Lou may have been trying to push him out. This is probably the last time with this team that the front office may not have been on the same page with the staff. It got ugly, but everyone was better off when it was done.
