How much if it is personnel and how much is coaching?

[*rfaulk34*]

(01-06-2021, 02:49 AM)wildcatnku24 Wrote: First, congrats on ur HOF status!  

I simply haven’t seen what ZT can do when more than half his team is healthy.  I mean gosh, we suffered ML for 100 years.  ZT inspires these young men to play their tails off.  Now, if you field a team full of actual starters, I think we see much better results.    If we don’t, we move on to the next one.  People throw out “another wasted year with burrow” etc, but the thing is ZT has the full support of said QB.  I’m not interested in assumptions based on what Burrow didn’t say. The fact is he is excited to play for ZT and likes the direction/culture that ZT is establishing.  Other players are saying it, too.  Why not have a little faith and see where it takes us?  

Ty sir and Go Cats. 

I get that optimistic take and it would be nice (for once) to see a healthy team for longer than one or two games. It's just too hard to ignore how other teams overcome injuries and are at least competitive and able to win a share of their games. Some things stand out like a sore thumb. Take one score games for instance. Most teams win half of those. Zac's teams are 2-13-1. Look at any average team--7-9, 8-8, 9-7--and you will see they typically win half of their road games. 5 and 6 win teams will typically win 3 games on the road each year. Zac's teams are 1-1-14 on the road...2-10 in the division...taking more than half a year to recognize and fix problems with the offensive line...sticking with a passive defense by rarely blitzing while teams thrive on their 4 man rush week after week...an inability to show diversity or innovation on offense until late in the year...the list goes on and on.

If we go back a bit further than that, he's the one that hired Jim Turner and Lou Anarumo and their inability to communicate properly with their players, leading to all the problems we've read about. Those two things look to be fixed with one firing and one guy that seems to be doing better but it took 1 3/4 seasons for those changes to happen. 

I'm not trying to be a debbie downer but those are all real things and they're all real problems. Optimists will generally overlook most of the bad and point towards the possiblities of the future. Pessimists will generally overlook all the good and point to the past. I'm typically optimistic or pessimistic depending on the day of the week during football season. But when it comes to the outlook of the team, it's really hard to look at the hard facts and truly believe that Zac can turn this thing around. History isn't on his side either, by what 'holic has posted recently. The infamous 'Dead Cat Bounce' isn't just a cute chatchphrase, it's a phenomenon that this team has a lot of experience with, and in each case, it doesn't turn out well for the following year. I don't put a whole lot of weight into players playing hard for him. Those guys are playing for their livelihood and future paychecks. It's beyond rare that players will obviously give up on a coach and tank it.

All that said, another fact of the matter is, we have no choice but to sit back and see what happens next year because Zac will definitely be here. There just aren't any tangible signs that point to it being any more successful than the previous two years, and when it's all said and done, that's another one to two years wasted because of short-sighted, half measures.