mansquatch wrote:I just don’t think I’m of the view that the current debacle represents a state of new normal for the team. They’ve lost 9 games out of 10. That HAS to be a factor in the current mess. It is certainly an embarrassment, but I’m not seeing the conclusion that Mike Zimmer has suddenly lost his ability to coach as a result of it. That just feels like it is going too far. Mentally this team is completely at the bottom of the barrel.
A fair criticism/ question of Zimmer is to ask why he hasn’t bene able to bring them out of the funk? It might be better to ask why he has allowed the Defense to crack in December? It seems like they’ve slowly pulled the offense off the edge of the cliff, but now the defense has decided to go into the tank. How did that happen?
I look back on this season and I think a critical point was the week before Halloween. A question to ask of Zimmer is how come he couldn't right the ship mentally after that loss to PHI? We had a road game on MNF against a putrid Bears team. We get blown out. That to me was the first critical failure of the year. We end up with Norv walking out after that. (What happened there?) Then the wheels came off vs. DET. They finally did something and cut Walsh, solving a lingering problem that had plagued them really since 2014. However, that was probably done 2-3 weeks too late and by then it wasn’t enough. We needed two return TDs to get that win vs. AZ. Offensively the team was / is in shambles. (It feels like they’ve ever so slightly pulled it out of the abyss, but the DEF has gone into the tank.) That is a lot of up and down in the season. What gives Zimmer?
Was the offensive coaching dysfunction so bad that it was just a matter of time before it all blew up? I think that is at least part of it. This begs the question that was posed by that article posted a week or two ago about Zimmer not knowing who he wanted to hire on Offense. Just how much went into the offensive coaching hires? Pure conjecture on my part, but I think this season we saw Zimmer finally start to recognize some of what he wants out of his OC and Norv just wasn't it. To be clear, this doesn't mean that Zimmer has suddenly figured out what he needs to do to field a winning offense.
(FWIW, I think at least part of the mess was due to Norv being as stubborn and rigid as we all thought he was.)
For me a lot of this gets back to an over-arching question on the coaching staff. It was obvious during the start of the swoon that the offense was a major issue. Is the current O staff competitive? For the Wilfs and Spielman, is Zimmer the answer at HC? Or more specifically, can he grow out of this challenge or have we seen peak Zimmer? My opinion is that we haven’t seen peak Zimmer yet, but he needs to grow. A further question for everybody: Why did it take so long to cut Walsh? Lastly, why has this roster so badly underperformed in 2016? We are not worse than DET or CHI, yet we are likely to be 0-4 against them. That has to change.
That's a whole heap of good questions.
I think it took so long to cut Walsh because they were trying to be patient with him and because it can be hard to find genuine improvement at a position (even kicker) during the season. We've seen that with Forbath who has been perfect on FG attempts but has already missed 3 of his 9 extra point attempts.
I think some of your other questions, like those about the coaching staff, Zimmer's ability to grow and why the roster has underperformed all get back to some of the issues we've been discussing all season (and even longer than that). I still contend that the roster has underperformed on offense because it was poorly envisioned and constructed in the first place. On defense, what we're seeing is pretty close to what we've seen in the previous 2 seasons under Zimmer. They're allowing about 30 yards less per game on average but otherwise, it's not dissimilar. They have moments of dominance, games where they seem to just falter and get blown out and a tendency to commit frustrating penalties or have breakdowns in crucial moments.
When it comes to what happened between Zimmer and Turner, the bottom line is we don't know but it IS interesting to speculate. I don't know if Turner's departure was an indication that Zimmer had decided Norv couldn't be the kind of OC Zimmer wanted or if Turner ultimately decided he just couldn't be the OC he wants to be under the circumstances. Since it was Turner's choice to leave and Zimmer seemed taken by surprise when Turner resigned, I lean toward the idea that Turner concluded his offensive philosophy was at odds with what Zimmer (and perhaps Spielman?) are trying to do in Minnesota so he stepped aside to enable Zimmer to turn to Shurmur.
I have a feeling Zimmer was the more stubborn and rigid of the two coaches but maybe it was both of them and that made for a bad mix.
that's like losing your precious HOF QB and if you did, you would be a bottom feeder. So no, I never referred to "just the OL". I referred to the 4 most important positions on the offense
I got a chuckle out of that last line because the story really could change (again).
