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Let me stress the front office. It is uber important to winning and in more ways than just talent accumulation. This includes ownership. Strong front office management flows downhill to the very base elements of the organization. And this can makeup for shortfalls in talent. Good front office, good coaching staff, strong and positive HC makes the team better even if they have a talent shortfall.
Let's look at not necessarily winning championships but also not excluding challenging for championships but putting winning seasons together, fielding strong cohesive and successful teams .
To me this is a very challenging exercise. Extremely. And it is hard to look at it with an impartial eye.
Ownership: There are some great owners that "help" their teams. This may be accomplished in several ways from being totally hands off and hiring as great GM to be the Chief Operating Officer to having an eye for the game and being more engaged with operations.
Stronger ownership teams IMO: SF, Philly, Seattle, KC, and maybe Pitt . The best of these is Philly IMO with SF close behind. Pitt seems to have struggled for a few years now and could be eliminated from my list. GB seems to be the only different animal here as they are owned by stockholders and the central figures would CEO/GM with a Board of Directors. This has to be determined to be successful when looking at their record.
Weakest ownership teams (classically bad): Miami, Houston, LV, Washington. Honorable (or dishonorable) additions that can be a tier up would be NO, Dallas, NYJ, Arizona, Chicago and maybe Detroit. I might add that Dallas seems to be climbing out of this pit of despair but for 2 decades Jerry Jones was a strong liability to on field success.
Now to be sure a strong QB and a strong HC can elevate a team to on field success. But you would need both factors plus non-detrimental front office.
The most obvious teams would be Reid / Mahomes at KC (obviously an easy choice). Philly with Hurts/Sirianni. And then Burrow/Taylor deserves mentioning since they arrived in Cincy the Bengals are challenging for the AFC Championship. Prior to that Cincy hadn't won a playoff game in 31 years. To be clear though this could be much more Burrow than Taylor.
In SF I have to say it is strong coaching and especially HC because the QB has been in flux. There's just no other way to look at it. And in Buffalo I have really mixed feelings in that in some instances I feel that their have been QB failures and in others coaching failures but surely with Buffalo's recent success they deserve to be in this mix but there is also something not quite meshing well.
So obviously some of you are more intimately aware of some situations than I because in many I am just and NFL on the outside looking in. What is your take both overall and with specific teams?
(Yeah, we're in the NFL Dead Zone waiting on training camps to start -- just trying to stimulate discussion here)
It is in practice only one thing, the DRAFT! Missing on cheap starters crushes a team. Good drafts wit only the standard picks get 2-3 starters each year for a discount over the average starter player wage. This lets yo pay the QB, the LT, the DE, the cover CB ... Those teams that are able to acquire draft capitol and still get those same starters, well its even better. If you can come out of a draft with 5 starters on 4 or 5 (for 1sts) year below market deals, you are set. Of course you can miss on a FA or two which can hurt. Injuries obviously can wreck it all. But it all starts with the draft. In practice, without good drafts, nothing else can carry the day.
It is in practice only one thing, the DRAFT! Missing on cheap starters crushes a team. Good drafts wit only the standard picks get 2-3 starters each year for a discount over the average starter player wage. This lets yo pay the QB, the LT, the DE, the cover CB ... Those teams that are able to acquire draft capitol and still get those same starters, well its even better. If you can come out of a draft with 5 starters on 4 or 5 (for 1sts) year below market deals, you are set. Of course you can miss on a FA or two which can hurt. Injuries obviously can wreck it all. But it all starts with the draft. In practice, without good drafts, nothing else can carry the day.
Well, that's in current times.
In the 1980's, the Redskins had, I think.. TWO first round draft picks.
1980 - Pick 18 - Art Monk
1981 - Pick 20 - Mark May
1983 - Pick 28 - Darrell Green
So.. Not two.. Three. three DAMN good picks, admittedly. But.. That was a different time. Pre salary cap/free agency/etc.
You are correct, however, that the draft now is massively important. If you goof up a first round draft pick, it hurts far less. Remember the last pick prior to the new draft pay scales.. I think Sam Bradford signed a 6 year, 78 million contract with 50 million guaranteed.
Whereas the next #1 overall, Cam Newton, only got the 4 year 22 million.
William Clay Ford was the singular owner. For the majority of his tenure he was hands off and was fiercely loyal to his GM's. It was never an ego thing of refusing to admit he screwed up. Fontes was fired after the culmination of giving up 58 points in the playoffs and then going 5-11.
Junior, the vice chairman, backed his old man and Chuck Schmidt publicly but he did redeem himself years later by forcing the issue with Millen and finally saving us from that disaster.
And before that, almost as hated as MM...was Russ Thomas.
GM Thomas was notoriously cheap. In 1989, Thomas' final year before FINALLY retiring, he wouldn't sign Barry Sanders to a very fair deal. Remember, the Packers gift wrapped him to the Lions by taking Mandarich.
72 hours before the first kickoff of the season, he finally caved. Barry suited up, but didn't start. 'Ole Thomas sure showed him who's boss, eh?
That was at the end of the Thomas era. Before that, the Lions drafted Biletnikoff & Hadl. That's right. They weren't gonna play for that cheapskate. Even Don Shula got out of Dodge City.
It was strange seeing my father, a lifelong Lions' fan, turn the TV off when Greg Landry...gray hair & all, come out of retirement to QB the Lions.
Obviously you need to have the right people in key leadership positions, but you also need stability then. If you can't retain good people, if philosophies and systems keep changing, if people are worried about their jobs, it's going to cause confusion and dysfunction.
No one has really touched on what I asked at the start..
What the heck went wrong in Green Bay in from the 70's to the 90's?
They were pretty dang awful, short of a few surprising years (Don Majkowski being the magic man)
And.. I haven't been able to figure out why. i know the Mandarich thing blew up in their faces, but.. They actually recovered from that fairly quickly. It's almost like that was the wake up call.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Labonte18
No one has really touched on what I asked at the start..
What the heck went wrong in Green Bay in from the 70's to the 90's?
They were pretty dang awful, short of a few surprising years (Don Majkowski being the magic man)
And.. I haven't been able to figure out why. i know the Mandarich thing blew up in their faces, but.. They actually recovered from that fairly quickly. It's almost like that was the wake up call.
Talent acquisition and mediocre QBing?
What do you think accounted for their poor results?
To be honest I was just a Cowboys fan and not so much watching the League delopements the 70s.
What do you think accounted for their poor results?
To be honest I was just a Cowboys fan and not so much watching the League delopements the 70s.
I have no idea, lol.. That's why I asked. Figured we'd have enough Packers fans here who could point to the reason.
I'd agree that mediocre QB play, even for the 80's, was part of it. But.. Green Bay doesn't seem to accept mediocrity for long. This was 20+ years of it. I'm looking at the 1985 team.. And to be honest.. The only name I remember anything about on there is Jim Zorn.. And nothing I remember about Jim Zorn is good. Either as a player or as a coach.
Wait.. 2 names.. Al Del Greco. Who was a decent to good kicker for his time. But.. No other names on that roster are triggering any kind of memory for me.
Did they just have a bad GM? They were using former star players as a head coach.. Bart Starr and Forrest Gregg.. Was that it? They let Starr be HC for 9 years.. Pretty much all bad.
Someone said it, but I was going to say drafting well.
Yes, all of the things already mentioned--strong front office, good ownership, etc--yes.
But, at the end of the day, you have to get the players. A strong/great GM/front office helps with that, of course. If you can nail drafting--and not just early round pics, but late ones--you have a chance to keep your team rolling.
Getting those late round picks really helps because you might be able to unearth a quality starter or two at a cheaper price for a few years, but you also add quality depth to your team.
And, of course, you need some good ol' plain luck.
With the NFL wanting to add even more games, it is really just going to come down to a war of attrition and a good/great QB.
Ownership. Everything starts and ends with the owner.
The owner has only 3 jobs.
1. Find a good General Manager.
2. Stay out of the Managers way.
3. Fire an underperforming GM.
That is it.
All of the teams that are continually bad have bad owners.
If your owner hires a top GM, and your brilliant GM hires top coaching talent, and drafts top QB talent, you are a lock for success. Everything else is a detail from offensive and defensive lines to skill positions.
So in a way, I would say the GM is everything, but a bad owner can and will ruin a team with a great GM. That is why I say, ownership is everything.
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Yeah, we're in the NFL Dead Zone waiting on training camps to start -- just trying to stimulate discussion here)
