I know you're taking heat here — I'm pretty sure I agree with you that, in a vacuum, Kliff's offense and playcalling is probably fine. Not, like, elite, but good enough to be an average to above-average offense in the NFL with the right supporting personnel.
But — and a lot of people are saying this and it's not breaking through or getting drowned out or you're rolling over it — Kliff's main job as a head coach is not to call good plays. He can't throw his hands in the air and say Kyler needs to do better (even behind closed doors).
I made this point multiple times over the winter and spring, but my POV is that a great head coach is worth more than a good quarterback. I don't think that Kliff is a great head coach now and I don't really think he's going to develop into one. So if Kliff ends up topping out at an okay head coach, you have to get rid of him and hope to find someone who can handle Kyler better.
I also don't really understand why people are so mad at Kilff. It's not really his fault he's the head coach; all he did was accept a pretty sweet job offer. Blame Keim for having the galaxy-brained idea that Kliff would be so successful as a playcaller he'd be poached immediately for a head coaching role.
I really couldn't care about Kliff. I've wrote at length in the past about his weaknesses both in scheme and as a man manager. At the same time, and to be fair to the man, he works extremely hard, he's got better every year until this year and he is statistically the 4th best Cardinals HC since the merger.
But no, he's not great, and really I couldn't care less if they fired him. But it has to achieve something and I just don't see what. It feels purely reactionary.
It may well be they have to fire him just so they can move on and tell the players it was Kliff's fault as some kind of psychological salve for next season. "Everything's good now guys. Kliff has gone and everything will be better!". Until they hit the field.
The main issue is that if you move on you have to get someone better and this simply is not an attractive organisation and Kyler with his 6 YPA, study clauses and Twitter memes is not an attractive quarterback at the moment.
So if Kliff goes Keim goes. They are tied (or should be) at the hip. And I'd be fine with that if we brought in some great guy from outside the Org that would change the culture and attract a great coaching talent he has worked with. But we all know that won't happen.
It's going to be A-Dub with Mike pulling the strings. Steve Keim 2.0. The same culture and no connections outside the Org to source talent from. They will make Vance Joseph the HC and Spenser Whipple the OC and it will be terrible. Or they will run through some retreads that get fired at the end of this year.
And then what? I'm to expect Kyler who's been given everything possible by Kingsbury to succeed including a simplified college type scheme and verbiage and reduced responsibility (he isn't calling protections) and who doesn't have to sneak and can avoid all hits, I'm to expect him to suddenly get better having to learn a whole new scheme and play a whole new way?
So it's not that I give a crap about Kliff. It's simply that I think the alternative is worse. And that is on Keim and Mike for paying an unproven QB after year 3 that can only play a very specific type of football which further restricts your coaching options.
I would bet all my money that if kliff is fired they go with Vance ("He was interviewed for the Dolphins so other teams see him as a HC" they will say) and Whipple so that they can keep the same offense or a version of it because they know they can't change it.
