Mr. Scot

I watched a lot of college football early in the season but have tailed off since. Not familiar with him. About the only receivers I ever hear anybody talk about are Harrison Jr and Keon Coleman.

There's definitely evidence, circumstantial though it may be, that points in that direction. There's that, plus the way David Tepper raved about how Young answered questions at their dinner.

Byrd and Smith were more what you look for in a West Coast receiver. Mind you, neither of them were great, but at least they fit the skill set. To put it in terms most can relate to, I'd say mango is best suited for a Muhsin Muhammad type role (once he develops). We also have a Ricky Proehl type in Adam Thielen. What we're missing is a Steve Smith.

Corbett came from McVay's system so I'd expect him to know how to work in that kind of scheme. Moton has a really good mix of power, agility and balance so he suits pretty much anything you want to run. It's from the center-left where the issues start. I still think Bozeman could handle this kind of attack if he had good guard play. Plenty of great centers look like crap when they have to account for poor play beside them. Ickey at left tackle is the most obvious mismatch. But could he handle a left guard spot in a WCO? Probably. At the very least, it's worth a shot. But then of course, we're in the spot of looking for a left tackle again, unless Brady Christensen can handle the job. He's definitely more suited to a WCO outside spot than Ickey, so at least potentially you'd have the option of retooling the line without making major personnel changes. Obviously though, that can't happen this season.

No, they didn't. But before we make the next move, I'd want to know why.

Just the opposite actually... Death of the long pass: Are vertical plays trending toward extinction? E-P, WCO and spread type concepts are way more common these days than the Coryell style approach. There are still longballers of course, but analysis of trends in recent seasons shows things moving in the other direction.

Lemme throw out another theoretical possibility for in-season change... Thomas Brown could potentially be relieved of his duties...and replaced with Jim Caldwell. To be clear, I'm pointing that out as something that could happen as opposed to something that should, but the merits of such a move might bear discussion.

Most of the best WCO quarterbacks in the league had only moderate arm strength. It's not a necessity for this type of attack, or even for an E-P like Brady ran for pretty much his whole career. But you can't have as big a personnel mismatch as we have and expect to still run that sort of scheme.

Unless your name is Nicole, I'm afraid I have my doubts

There's that plus his own admission that he reads Panthers Twitter. It's one thing to get the message that you aren't liked though, quite another to come to the realization that you are actually the bad guy. Nobody comes to that understanding easily. Most don't come to it at all.

Think you can sell David Tepper on that idea?

Not the only solution... For one, I pointed out in the other thread that you could retool the scheme to suit the players we have this year leading into next year. But then of course, there is the option mentioned by others to simply get a quarterback who fits what we're doing rather than one who doesn't. Nice idea perhaps, but how do you do that given what we already gave up to get this quarterback? It's like the story of Tantalus.

You mean replace one player rather than replace ten? I get what you're saying, but I don't foresee that being the approach.

That sort of meeting is pretty much standard operating procedure around the league. Unfortunately, we ended up with ten offensive positions manned by Coryell style players surrounding a West Coast quarterback. So one, how did that happen? But then two, why weren't changes made to the scheme once we saw what we had? This is why I say there's no easy answer and it's not as simple as just firing somebody for the sake of doing something.

Depends on who you believe... Word around the league (reported by reliable sources) is that David Tepper influenced the choice when Reich wanted to go in another direction. It's also possible that Scott Fitterer, who openly professed that he believed in Young before Reich ever got here, pushed things in that direction. Bottom line though: We got what we got. And regardless of who made the pick, the coaching staff decides what scheme to run, and we're running the wrong one despite insistence that the scheme should be tailored to the players rather than the other way around. Oy

By the way, that was supposed to read "the Colts connection" not "Nicole's connection". My voice to text betrayed me. Ended up being ironic as hell though

Now mind you, the flipside to everything just mentioned is that it's still Frank Reich deciding what schemes we run. So even if we didn't get the quarterback he most wanted, it would have been on him to try and adjust to the quarterback we got. In other words...what an unholy mess

I'm coming around to the belief that we didn't go the quarterback route that Frank Reich wanted, whether it was Derek Carr CJ Stroud or whomever. If true, there are two people potentially responsible for that... One of them is Scott Fitterer. He himself said he was sold on Young long before Reich ever got here. But he's also known as a consensus builder and a believer in collaborative approaches. So does it make sense that he'd override the head coach he hired? The other option, of course, is David Tepper. And on that front, you've got numerous examples of him interfering in both big and small ways with football operations. But perhaps more to the point, the chatter from reliable sources (including Reich) that he's too hands on. Mind you, it could also be a combination, i e. Fitterer being basically the right hand of Tepper. In a case like that, it doesn't matter who the GM is because they're just a figurehead. What's the truth? Wish I knew.

We've got a quarterback that's ideally suited to a West Coast Offense surrounded with ten positions manned by Coryell type players. That's just not gonna work, and what makes it worse is it's an extremely difficult problem to fix.

Not really... The offense has predominantly Coryell style personnel. That includes both the line and the skill players. To run that system, you need a longball style quarterback like Stroud. Heli, even Anthony Richardson would hit that sort of approach. Instead, we have a West Coast type of quarterback.

See above. I've been hesitant to judge Scott Fitterer based on the circumstances. That doesn't make me a fan, but I get called that a lot. I am a legitimate fan of Frank Reich, and have been for a long time. But if you were to ask me who's more responsible for where we're at right now, that's when I'd point you to the previous post. And yes, David Tepper scares me. He should scare all of us

It's still valid to point out that this was the first year of a rebuild. (yes I know they said otherwise, but it still is; even Steve Smith acknowledged that last night) Here's the thing though... The GM doesn't determine the coaching schemes. He ideally gets players that are suited for those schemes, but he doesn't pick what schemes to use or what players to start. So now that we have a mismatch between personnel and scheme, how did that come about? Did Fitterer pick the wrong guys? Maybe, but that's kind of hard to say given that we know he took a lot of input from the coaching staff on both the draft and free agents (Miles Sanders, for example). You also have a head coach who came in stating that he believed in tooling the scheme to the players, not the other way around. That's why I say you have to see where the problem really is before deciding just to fire somebody because if you fire the wrong guy, you've only made it worse.

You could argue that they did have a system you could have dropped a quarterback into, just not this quarterback. You've got a West Coast quarterback trying to run an offense that's pretty poorly tooled for a West Coast attack. It's not so poorly built for a Coryell style quarterback, but that's not what we have.

In an ideal Coach/GM relationship, The coach tells the GM the kind of players he needs (maybe even naming specific guys) and the GM goes out and gets them. Lots of different ways that can go wrong of course, but that's the way it's supposed to work. And at least based on what's known of the guys we have in place, that's what everybody was expecting. The question is where did it go wrong...

Stephen Holder is a guy who's covered the Colts for several years. If I remember correctly he's currently with The Athletic. Nicole's connection also means he's very well acquainted with Frank Reich.