http://youtube.com/watch?v=VdpxLLohP1c
Lets all hope this 2011 season can be remembered for one thing: Lessons learned by the Glazer brothers who own the franchise. Fans who watched the car wreck disguised as a football game last night want to blame it all on Raheem Morris.
Morris is too nice of a guy to take all the blame. He is responsible for his share, no doubt. His players, the same ones who were the ‘best team in the NFC” last year, and 4-2 and in first place in the NFC South with a 2-0 record in the division, quit and laid down on their coach last night instead of playing for him. It does not matter how you look at it. Its one or the other:
1)The players are good but Morris cant coach them.
2)The players are no good, Morris coached them as best he could.
..neither are acceptable, and both are the fault of the head football coach and general manager. The defense is the worst it has been in franchise history, and mind you, this is a franchise with some putrid history to it. The offense is horrible, and there is no need to point any fingers. An elbow in any direction will do.
Some players did show up with fire last night, but the problem is it seemed there was only about half. So is that all there is in Raheem’s corner: 50% of this team? You have to think even he feel’s surprised at that development.
I wont go on and on here and call for the head coaches job. Raheem Morris deserves better than that. There are too many changes that need to be made, and you can only do that at the end of the year. Besides, if you get rid of all the guilty parties, you’ll have the only good assistant coach left in Keith Millard to run the Team, coach the Offense and Defense too? No, the last game is Saturday at Atlanta, New Nears Eve, so its perfectly fitting that the axe falls on New Years Day; the first day of 2012…at least if you want more than 30,000 at Raymond James Stadium for the 2012 home opener.
Most important, is that lessons be learned:
You do not put a team of kids together without a veteran leader at each level. The excuse is outside people dont play along with the Buccaneers core values. Guess what, neither do these Buccaneer players, so what does that matter.
New Years Day, these changes should be made:
- Announce that the Bucs will be active participants in free agency.
- The Raheem Morris experiment was a failure, but it wasn’t his fault. He was set up to fail. Regardless, the performance of the team over the last 2 months has shown he is not ready to be a head coach when things go bad. One day he probably will, but if this team is too young to compete, Raheem is too young to coach them.
- Find an offensive coordinator to replace Jeff Jagodzinski. Greg Olsen was an interim replacement, that was never addressed.
- Find a defensive coordinator to replace Jim Bates. Raheem Morris was an interim replacement, and there was no sign he should have stayed after the results of 2010.
This football team was on the way to having a good season, but something derailed this team along the way. Was it getting a big head? Too much rock star treatment while in London? Too many kids telling each other how goo they are? Whatever it is, it’s something that we may not find out for years to come. But somewhere along the way this team faced some minor adversity. They were not able to overcome that, and then it turned into major adversity. It snowballed- and got worse and worse each week. There is enough blame for everyone, Owners, GM, Coach, Assistant Coaches, and players.
At this point it doesnt matter any more. This ship is not on course now, no matter what went wrong. Lets say this team and coaching staff were able to go 9-7 next year. That would be probably a 5 game turn around, one of the best turnarounds in the NFL, and how many tickets do you think it would sell in 2013? What if you go 10-6 in 2013 and win a wild card game. How do you sell that the next year wont be a 6-10 setback when no one has been able to explain what happened here.
No, the only answer now is to clean house, disinfect that funky smell from One Buc, and learn your lesson when starting over.
Add The Sports Daily to your Google News Feed!
