I agree with a lot of the philosophy such as authority must accompany responsibility or good leadership fixes broken processes. The problem is, he makes a lot of conclusory allegations without providing support for either of those premises.
I'll go down the list:
1) Did McVay restrict the number of audibles that quarterback Jared Goff could call? He doesn't establish that to be the case and he needs to because there were reports this year that Goff had lots of freedom to call audibles. In fact, there were theories stated here over the last couple of weeks that McVay was upset with Goff for calling TOO MANY audibles.
2) Did McVay hold Goff solely responsible for the offense? He doesn't establish that. In fact, he has no idea, and neither do any of us, on what their internal evaluations have determined. Has McVay decided that he needs to make changes to his scheme? Has he determined that the OL was partially responsible for the woeful offense?
3) Given that he's sorely lacking in evidence on two of his main assertions regarding the authority/responsibility relationship, his theory that there is responsibility without authority falls apart.
4) He states, if it's a bad play, if the WR blows his assignment, or the OL fails, it's Goff's fault. He just states that as an opinion but provides no evidence or does any analysis on how he arrives at that conclusion. Maybe he's saying that fans blame the QB. Fine. But that doesn't establish that the Rams are a bad organization doing the same shallow analysis.
5) He compares Goff's turnovers in his early years with great QBs but he doesn't provide analysis on other aspects of those QBs' performances. How does Goff's yards, comp. %, TD/TO ratio stack up against the QBs he compared Goff to? This is an extreme example but if Wilson had the same number of turnovers in 80 games as Goff but double the TDs, leaving that fact out distorts the picture and is bad analysis. Thus, the analysis is incomplete here.
6) Then he states that the Rams reasonably expected Goff to tighten up on ball security and that Goff did that. But he fails to analyze why the last 6 games are a trend and what makes them different from the previous 26 games where he was a league leader in turnovers. How do we know there was some permanent fix? He gives no reasons why he believes that the lack of turnovers will continue forever.
7) And even if it was a permanent fix, he fails to even mention or analyze the downside on how Goff was reducing turnovers. Namely, he was being super careful and not attempting any deep shots as evidenced by the awful Y/A. There is no analysis on how that cripples the offense. It's something that McVay mentioned as being very undesirable.
8) His one solid and supported point is that Goff has been a winning QB. But this one point is not nearly enough to say he made a good case.
Overall, it's an interesting article with some good philosophy but he does a terrible, terrible job providing any real facts to support his conclusion.
