Is 11 months on the job really rushing to judgement?
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It’s a great point, Ron. I believe in continuity, and thus I almost always wants a head coach, a general manager, a player, or basically any other job description in society to get time to implement ideas, concepts and strategies. I think sustainable success is developed over time. Having said that, I don’t think any NFL team should have to go through a crisis like this. I call it a crisis because of the severity of the situation, and not because it necessarily has to take several years to recover from.
In reference to your playing level, I believe in having a solid floor. The highs can obviously go as high as they can, but your lows shouldn’t go that low. I think you need to have sort of a foundation to your playing level, so that you never fall so deep that you can’t recover in a hurry. Bruce Arians used to say that great leadership within the team should – at least in theory - prevent them from losing two in a row, and I guess that was one of his ways of creating that foundation. I am not saying Steve Wilks has destroyed the leadership on the team, but he certainly hasn’t improved it either, and he hasn’t created that foundation in other ways. To go by the metaphor I used before, there is a very long way up to that foundation after falling this low. This is the NFL, and in the NFL you don’t get much time, so maybe it is deemed that it simply takes too long before he has potentially built that foundation.
Another thing I think should determine whether Wilks should stay or go is the relations within the organization and the respect his co-workers has for him. What I mean is that if Michael Bidwill or Steve Keim (or both) don’t feel very much in sync with Wilks, he should be let go. If the players don’t have the respect and good relationship with Wilks (and no, despite what seemingly a lot of posters think, none of us know if this is the case), he should be let go. Sustained internal unrest and frictions are poison to any organization, and it can grow to something even worse. If there is no problem in either scenario, though, then I think there is at least a basis for giving it another shot.
So, I think they should start over with another head coach. I think the playing level has gotten that bad, that something seems broken to me. I don’t know what it is, but it’s a fact that it never got this ugly while the trio of Michael Bidwill, Steve Keim and Bruce Arians was in charge, so I tend to think that Steve Wilks is a part in what is broken. Again, none of us can know this for sure, but in my opinion it seems like a lost cause to try to repair the damage.