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wv ram
But where Fisher ranks among the 32 coaches he coached against....is not somethin we all agree on.
I can see decent arguments that Fisher was an ok coach who got derailed by key injuries and clusters of key injuries.
Maybe he was a "Knox" level coach who got derailed. Maybe not. ...
Fwiw, my 'own' personal subjective view (today) is that Fisher was an "ordinary" NFL coach. Not great, not terrible. I think he got derailed by injuries. Or else the Rams woulda been wildcard level. ...
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Is the relative scale of assessment.
I mean, if someone wants to say he was "ordinary" or "OK" ... well, I can't necessarily tilt against that windmill. It's not a very high bar.
I don't see how it leads to an expectation of wildcard-level achievement.
As for the injury deal, I really don't know what to say about that. How does injury explain last year's collapse? How can a good coach be "derailed" by injuries?
Sure. A team's ceiling in a given season can be lowered by injuries. But good coaches keep their teams battling and competing. How do injuries explain the poor preparation and uneven effort levels? How do they explain that NYG game right after the 2 shutouts? The collapses in games in which we held a winning position? I just don't get that.
When I complain about Fisher, I never hold him responsible to a standard that would be affected by injuries. He didn't have to win X numbers of games for me, no matter what the injury count in a given year.
I hold him responsible for the slackness that showed up again and again. I hold him responsible for coaching a team that competed 4-5 times a year and collapsed the rest of the time.
Your comparison to Knox is interesting because of the time factor. Knox was a helluva coach the first time. The 2nd time? I remember hearing say he still had "fire in the belly" in an unconvincing fashion.
At TENN, Fisher was probably a pretty "good" coach.
With us, he began OK in Season 1, and then things slid every year to a lower and lower level. I can't see how anyone could make much of a case that he wasn't just mailing it in last year.
So, perhaps we could agree that he was an "OK" coach who slid from that not very high bar each season. I guess I could live with that.
I will say this. I care about this disagreement for one key reason: I believe that, in football, coaching matters. When people question Fisher's responsibility, the common reasoning used, in my opinion, finds reasons to let the coach off from his fundamental responsibility: to prepare and lead a team to compete with discipline and consistency near its ceiling, whatever that ceiling is, including injuries. I just can't imagine anyone actually perceiving Fisher as having done that.
But, this issue will never be fully resolved, and it's probably reached the stage where I need to move on to avoid obsessively repeating myself.
