I found this vid very interesting and also confirming.
Something that stood out to me: Mack said that these guys were talented athletes last year and are talented athletes this year. Think about what he is saying there.
The OL stank last year. Stinking performance invites the conclusion that the players stink. Mack is saying that is not the case.
He also says that he learned by practicing technique over and over, getting his butt whipped, and learning. He acknowledges that the current practice limitations make it hard. But, his message is that these--talented!--athletes were constantly told about assignments but not drilled in execution. That was an underlying theme, sometimes overt and sometimes implicit, in everything he said. At a couple of points he laughs with gentle sarcasm, as when he says, "I dunno, I guess they thought the guys might forget their assignments."
OK, so we have talented athletes on the OL. Athletes who A] were not instructed in technique and B] stank in their performance. What was missing? The HARD bleeding WORK that transforms talent--i.e. potential--into execution and achievement. Especially on the OL, there is absolutely no other way to realize potential.
And, on the OL, the hard work has to be UNIT hard work. Torry spent all those extra hours catching machine-thrown balls. OL can't really do that. They can lift weights and work on footwork, but for an OL to gel, it has to cohere with 5 guys getting their individual techniques right and in synch with each other.
Which takes coaching. A QB can throw extra balls to WRs, but an OL has to be deployed by coaches with blocking rules, attack schemes, practice routines, and a discipline structure. There is no more coaching-dependent unit on a football team. The hard work that an OL needs to put in has to be led by a coaching staff.
And Tom Mack, one of the guys who locked me in to loyalty to this team, stood up and told us that last year's OL was NOT led through that hard work by a coaching staff. That is a damning indictment of the coaching staff. Tom Mack doesn't say stuff like that without understanding what he is saying. When was the last time you heard Tom freaking Mack being controversial for the fun of it?
For me, this kind of testimony confirms what I have sensed and come to believe. The essence of what was wrong with this team in the last couple of years was a culture of laziness. The EASY part for a coaching staff is to sit in the office and dream up schemes. The easy part of leading the players is just instructing them over and over on Xs and Os. The HARD part is to go out and lead units in executing that scheme.
Some of you guys might be too young to remember Lombardi or Jerry Kramer's book,
Instant Replay. Kramer's book was all about hard work led by a visionary coach. Lombardi had a pet play: the power sweep. He drilled the OL and backs on that play over and over again. He knew defenses would expect the Pack to run it, but he knew that if the execution were good enough, defenses would not stop it. The Xs and Os were perfectly familiar to everyone in the league. But Lombardi drilled that team on execution. That was what made the play work.
OK, that was 4-5 generations of football ago. Much has changed. Tom Mack must feel how much has changed since his day. Yet, in the end, OL is what it's always been: a unit of decently talented guys working together to deal with insanely gifted defending athletes. Tom Mack saw pretty clearly what lay behind all that OL dysfunction we've seen year after year: a coaching staff doing the easy stuff and stopping short of the hard work.
In this thread, someone talks about Boudreau "losing his fastball." I dunno about that. That is, I dunno if the key failure was Boudreau's. After all, the OL coach does not unilaterally choose what the OL does with its time.
What I do know is that a pattern of slackness, of inadequate preparation has hounded the Rams for most of Fisher's career. How often did we see them go into the 1st game of the season without any proper preparation, despite the weeks of training camp? How often did we see them come off a bye week playing in a fog, with no evidence of having taken advantage of the extra time to prepare? How often have we been unprepared for individual teams? How often was half-time spent doing nothing to adjust?
I don't think Fisher has cared a whole helluva lot about much during his Rams tenure. He has tolerated shoddy, uncompetitive performances from units, from individuals, and from coaches on his staff. I only watched 1 episode of
Hard Knocks last season. But I found 1 scene pathetic. It shows Fisher "being tough" by cutting a no-name FA who had a woman in the room and would never make the team anyway. I thought the scene was phony--a bad actor playing for the cameras to try to send the message that he could be tough. Meanwhile, I was never aware of any evidence that he showed any toughness in demanding performance from his team. Things going badly? Getting our butts whipped? Weakly giving up a lead? Dropping passes and 1st downs? Wasting chances to get stops, move the chains, or score? Ah, what the hell? Who cares?
This is the sort of thing everyone means when referring to the "culture" that has to change. It's been pervasive throughout the team. And anyone who knows anything about leadership in any field will tell you that a culture of shoddy, poor performance ALWAYS, always leads back to the guy in charge.
Look. I'm not saying that Fisher personally sabotaged the OL performance. I'm not saying Boudreau did.
I AM saying that Fisher has run a slack, lazy ship with lousy morale and discipline. And everyone gets caught up in that sort of malaise. I don't think Boudreau forgot how to coach. I think an aging Boudreau, getting tire anyway, let himself slide into a general malaise of slack coaching habits because that's what Fisher's coaching culture enticed out of his coaches. Boudreau knows how to coach technique. But letting it slide was the easy way, and Fisher's model of leadership was all about the easy way.
Is there a lot of speculation in the above? Sure. I dunno. I wasn't at the practices.
What is indisputable fact is that, as others have argued repeatedly, our young, apparently talented OL have NOT been developed or led to execution, unit coherence and discipline. Tom Mack has given us an insight into how that happened, a lazy coaching model that let it happen.
But, after all, what is the difference? Why keep beating the dead horse of Fisher's career? He's gone. Is he still relevant?
Well, yes in, I think a key way. We still have a lot of players who did poorly under Fisher's regime. The big question is whether they will continue to do so, whether the team can emerge out of the funk. I won't go into that here.
But I think Tom Mack confirms that, yes, a lot of it was about coaching. That we have some talented players who need to be better coached to succeed. That there are early signs that that is happening. I do think it's helpful to get very clear on Fisher's failure as a leader to clear the decks and start looking ahead.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/02/2017 10:18AM by RFL.
