Does anyone else notice a problem here? What we've heard from the coach and the front office all offseason has been a steady drum beat of evolution not revolution, a belief that our current roster can get 1% better every day, will stay disciplined, will go to work, practice hard and we'll surely see the results.
Linked is an article that unpacks this marginal improvement strategy nicely. Here is a particularly telling visual about what we can expect this team to do if all goes well - follow that blue line:
Here's the rub. Coach wants us to pretend that the 2017 season started in earnest at the beginning of that chart. Hey, we're only two games in! We can put that work in and ride that blue line up to the top if we only get 1% better at every position throughout the course of the season.
But the fans and certainly the press haven't forgotten last season. Every presser it's brought up that we're 8 games and counting since we've scored any points - a historically bad trend. So if you map our perception of where this team is, it's completely fallen off the charts into the red abyss.
Then you come across this quote - which is more likely to be true of this offense?
"Success is a few simple disciplines, practiced every day; while failure is simply a few errors in judgment, repeated every day."
—Jim Rohn
The definitions of failure and insane aren't so different - which perhaps explains the overall tone of this board lately. The Giants have re-packaged the same failures, the same bad players, the same bad draft choices, the same bad decisions that have been on repeat and have tried to pass them off as success stories waiting to be unearthed by a commitment to discipline and hard work.
I don't buy it. Do you?
Link - ( New Window )
The idea is that given Montgomery vs Patton, Patton understood strategy and Montgomery did not:
Montgomery would face the enemy at his strong front and try to match him there across the board in all ways.
Result was a stalemate and loss of mobility. You might correlate this to the 1% improvement strategy or 'complimentary ball'.
Patton would use his greatest mobility and greatest power at the weakest part of the enemy, or circumvent them entirely. Great results.
Remember Gulf War One? instead of going right into (or in addition to) going directly into Kuwait, they went around them into Iraq then cut off Kuwait and Iraqi Army from behind.
It correlates to football in that:
Rather than trying to 'maintain a rate of improvements across the board' or 'meet a standard' in ALL units (monty) , you build ONE unusually dominant unit, something that teams have never had to account for, do something new both in terms of people and in terms of play (patton).
You 'go around' problems by avoiding them, by building one super unit, and by being proactive, forcing teams to adjust to your project. Rather than asking your players to read and react, you as coach read and react during the week and create a way to attack weaknesses on game day. Put your best players on their worst players.
What if you have an unusually weak unit, so weak that you cannot 'go around?'
You might say that even Patton did not act alone, there were other units, holding ground, so he could be free to act according to his scheme to run free. That as Monty held ground in one place, or someone like him, (the OL) he was able to run (the wrs).
So, maybe you do need to improve your OL, from totally incompetent to decent. Patch it up.
To do this you would use OL schematics that are the easiest possible for them to excel at, just enough to get the ball out to your strong unit. Whatever it takes to put the OLers in a position to succeed in terms of play clock, seconds after snap, if not in terms of names and power.
So, you say that we do have ' the strong unit' in the WR/TE combination.
Problem is, obviously, as some of us have been repeating ad nauseum since forever, you cannot use pass receivers of all sorts if the basis of the offense is not rational in terms of people or in terms of scheme;
Simply put, ball starts at center, in time, and, given steps in time, if you don't have that base, its hard to start from your end point in time, the reception, and work backwards, in time, to the line.
Having said all that, we do have a very strong unit on D, the DL, and
...I do believe that this O line can actually learn how to run block, at which time your receivers may come into play as balance returns.
That's true, but it all comes back to the line. They made no line changes, and banked on the young guys getting better. But it hasn't happened.
If they can't keep Eli from getting knocked on his ass every other play and the backs from constantly getting hit 3 yards deep in the backfield, it doesn't really matter what upgrades they make at the skill positions.
By saying they spent all offseason the the facility trying to get better -- working on technique, getting 1% better all the time - I'm suggesting that the front office decided to not get OL help and instead chose to repackage the shit we have.
Obviously they chose poorly - and my point is this is not game 2 of 16. This is an extension of last year -- game 18/18 and we know what we have in these problem pieces at OL. To continue to make bad decisions repeatedly takes us deeper into that red abyss, to try and sell us that they're on the way to marginal improvement is a fools errand. And I don't buy it.