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dzrams
When Snead referred to unfortunate circumstances I think he was being polite. There were several unfortunate circumstances over the years but the biggest was the inept coaching.
I think "unfortunate" is literal. It refers to non-football bad fortune like Bradford suffering 2 injuries to the same knee. That is, Demoff knows enough about football to know that NO ONE wins when they are playing without both or either a relatively healthy OL and a starting caliber qb more than 75% of the time for 5 years (2012-15). I would not trust him to be a a decent football exec if he DIDN'T realize that. I think it's something of an achievement to actually reach 7-9 under those conditions.
It's clear the Rams had talent. They had lost 2 starters in the secondary and still had good starters at DB. They had Donald. I doubt anyone in the organization ever doubted Goff. I could go on.
My read of the situation is entirely different. I'm familiar with your position and not surprised with your stance.
I believe the unfortunate reference was only partially literal. I'm sure they recognized there was some bad luck. But they went with a coaching change anyway and kept the personnel guy the same. If non-football bad fortune was a good excuse, Demoff would have kept the HC and GM.
He didn't. That tells me he thought coaching was the primary problem. It tells me they didn't think 7-9 was an achievement of some type. Besides why are we talking about 7-9 and not 4-12?
When Demoff makes a statement about maximizing talent, there is strong inference that he doesn't think the talent was maximized. That's a coaching issue. So maybe he's willing to acknowledge that there was some bad luck but he believed the results should have been better anyway.
That's how you can say there has been bad fortune but still fire the coach.
That said, I'm still of the opinion that Snead used that term to take the high road and not say that "my bosses believed that the previous coach really sucked and the results weren't my fault."
This is probably one of those issues that we're unlikely to agree on...
