psjordan wrote: ↑Thu Feb 03, 2022 3:26 pm
Not really sure why a lot of posters on this board speak in absolutes, or close to it. Whether it's Cousins, which GM candidate they wanted, which process will or will not work, how Harbaugh was The Man and O'Connell will fail, etc.
Here's what I consider incontrovertible:
Deep down we all KNOW we don't know how these new hires will do. You can post like you know the absolute truth, but we all know that we don't know. We post to deal with it in different ways - the "I told you so" crowd loves it to go one way, the "I'll come back and eat crow" crowd likes it to go another, the "just give them a shot" crowd, the "anything is better than Zim/Rick" crowd, the "I just want some change" crowd, the "cautiously optimistic/glass half full but I-don't know" crowd, the "I don't care as long as they keep/cut Cousins" crowds - we are all dealing with the EXACT SAME feelings of "no matter WHAT I post here, I sure hope these guys pan out and I'll still dance around the house in my skivvies if they do". So I don't and won't beat anybody up about their posts on the hires. We're all dealing.
I've hired a lot of people over the years - hundreds - and I will say it's VERY hard to beat smart people who are willing to learn from every single transaction throughout the day. No matter their past experience. THOSE people are wildly successful for the most part.
Average to above-average QB's are GOLD in this league. A recent article on ESPN projected "QB moves this offseason", and they only listed 12 teams that they feel are "set" at QB, and that includes guys like ZWilson@NYJ.
Any team embarking on a QB quest has a tough road to hoe. Owners and GMs know this. Some will bite the bullet and suffer the process, others will hold on to whatever decent solution they can get at QB.
Typically I'd say not seeing Mond in action at this point is an indictment of his abilities, but I have to say with Zimmer all bets are off as to why Mond did not see action. Maybe he's simply not ready. Maybe Zimmer was teaching him a lesson. In either case, we need to know if he's a career backup at best.
This means Cousins is not an automatic jettison from the roster at this point, no matter how frustrated we are in terms of wins against winning teams.
I realize there is a lot of "these guys are professionals, they should just perform if they are up to it" thinking out there. I'll interject an opinion here - that's complete horse manure. Players respond differently to different coaching staffs, different perspectives, different gameplans, etc. There are hundreds of examples out there. Even just being TREATED differently can bring about major change in a player.
This means there is certainly a chance that Cousins "gets better" with a different staff, different relationships, a different playbook, a different in-game strategist and a different play caller. From the above-mentioned article, the WAS team has the worst QBR over the last 10 or 20 years, can't recall. So it's not like Kirk has been surrounded by tenured professors of the QB position. Of course, he could be stuck right where he is performance-wise for the rest of his career. The only point being we don't know.
So in the end it boils down to the owners and GM and new HC - can they form the right environment - including hard and soft skills - to get this team competitive in the post season? I do not think it boils down to the process used for hiring, nor the go-in position of ownership. Smart employees learn, and one of the things they learn is what they need to do in order to gain the bosses trust - and therefore some autonomy.
Who knows how the new hires will do. Certainly none of us.