Quote:
Originally Posted by MonkFan4Life
I just don't understand the notion that the Skins will forever be mediocre until they hire a GM. They'll be mediocre until they start winning more games.
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Winning on the field starts in the front office. Just look at the personnel decisions made before Gibbs came back. You can't consistently win without making good personnel decisions. How do you build a quality car, house, or electronics product...not by using inferior parts. How can you field a winning team without good players and the team's salary cap management being done properly.
Here's an analogy from gambling on football games from John Patrick that applies: "When betting games you will not be able to handicap the outcome of 50 % of the games due to factors you can't handicap, so you must be accurate on the other 50%. So if you bet 100 games you will automatically win 25 and lose 25 due to circumstances outside of your control. The other 50 will be won or lost on your evaluation of the game. Of the 50 you can control, if you evaluate 35 correctly you now have won 60 games and are "in the black".
Same concept with a GM. If you have a good GM he will make the correct decisions hopefully 70+% of the time, an average one will be 50% and a poor one 35%. If you take into account things you can't control, injuries, unreasonable contract demands, unpredictable free agent money being spent, with a good GM at the end of the day you should have better than average players and a better than average coaching staff. If that's the case, that "better than average" coaching staff should be able to coach "better than average" players into a .600 winning percentage. Over time that averages out to 10-6 or 9-7 every year.
If you look at teams that have had multiple years of success you can usually look to a good GM behind it. Bobby Bethard (Skins 80s), Bill Polian (Bills late 80s - early 90s, also Carolina mid 90s, Indy - current), Ron Wolf (80s Raiders, 90s Packers), Scott Piloli (New England). Bill Walsh oversaw the 80s-early 90s 49ers, I'm not sure if he had a GM but he is certainly an exception.
Another key reason to have a GM is that the Head Coach is focused on "win now". A GM is focused a bit more on the long term success of the franchise. With the salary cap and free agency, drafting well and developing in-house talent are much more critical than in the pre-cap era. Poor decisions in these areas now can cripple a team for years. Look at the mess we were in when Gibbs came back in 2004.