The airing of grievances. Sure, I'll play.

I love reading this on fan forums. It's as if we feel that we're speaking for the team officially, like we're all little GMs or something.

I'm not the GM; I'm a fan. I expect my GM to explain how something like this could happen, but I myself don't have to explain it to anyone. As a fan, I need to understand it, to know the reasons for a collapse like this one.

Is it not plausible that injuries, while perhaps not something the GMs and head coaches of the league can lean on as excuses for poor performances, could nonetheless be reasons for poor performance? With all the teams in the league watering down talent, is it realistic to expect teams to simply pop another one in the chamber without any dropoff?

Lots and lots of things have gone wrong this season, and if it sounds like I'm trying to give the FO and coaches a pass, I promise you that I'm not. Thompson has not stocked the OL and DL shelves properly, IMO. McCarthy, for some reason, seems to be having a harder time getting through to a bunch of kids this season than he did getting through to a QB legend that was supposed to be "hard to coach" last year. Thompson's penchant for letting proven FAs go and replacing them with either draft picks or lesser, unproven FAs bit the team in the ass this year. I expect him to shake things up this off-season and bring in some top-tier help, and I'll be first in the disgruntled line if he doesn't. I want shakeups in the coaching ranks as well -- Stock and Sanders, I'm looking at you. I want to see a strong commitment to defense, from coaches to players.

But, to swing this trainwreck back on-target, imagine if we had the following this year:

The same OL that ended last season, in the same configuration, all healthy, all season.

Ryan Grant, healthy and focused, all season.

Al Harris and Atari Bigby, healthy, all season.

CULLEN FREAKING JENKINS healthy, all season.

Imagine if just those things above were as I describe them, instead of how they really were. Do you think that possibly we might have done better this year? Maybe?

I'm asking.

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I'm going to leave the actual discussion to others for the moment, but your first sentence, "The airing of grievances" part, simply demands contextual reinforcement. :thumbleft:

After all, it IS the holiday season. :icon_smile:


[youtube]HQFLqMyo0fo[/youtube]

True, context is good. Thank you.

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I agree that this season would have gone better without all the injuries, but the fact of the matter is that good teams are able to over come injuries. Look at the Giants, they lost Osi, but their pass rush hasn't suffered any.

Injuries can't be predicted, but it's up to the GM to make sure his team is stocked with enough depth to cover up the holes left by injury, so that the injuries don't have as great as an affect as they have had on us this year.

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I applaud you for putting CULLEN FREAKING JENKINS in all caps, because that was the biggie. It was bad luck, but at the same time, it is up to Ted Thompson to find a decent backup. In the fourth year of his tenure as GM, he should've had somebody better than Montgomery, Hunter, or Thompson to play RE.

As a wise fan once said, "There's a reason that backups are backups. It's because they're not as good as starters." The injuries were probably a big part of this year's collapse. But like most fans, I would still like to see at least one or two significant free agent signings in the off-season. And if the injuries are kept to a minimum, this could be a good team next year. It will be put-up or shut-up time for Thompson, McCarthy, and a lot of these players, that's for sure.

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Yeah sure injuries are not ideal. But lots of teams overcome injuries. The Giants lost Osi and Plaxico and even Jacobs is banged up. Injuries happen to every team at some point, you have to have depth. And thats on the GM. You can't just use the excuse of losing one player for the reason to having a run defense in the bottom 1/3 of the league.

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I'm going to submit that the presence of Tuck on the Giants' roster should fall under the category of Luck, but I also said that in my view Thompson hasn't done a good job of stocking the lines. I'll also add that w/out Plax, Jacobs, and the T and G who are out, the Giants have lost two more games than they'd lost the rest of the season. So they're not immune.

Again, I'm not excusing anything -- I'm saying that if Jenkins and KGB had been healthy we might not even be sitting here discussing what was wrong with this team.

My point is that trying to reach for things like 'intangibles' is either silly or being done by people who have an agenda that's different than simply wanting to know what went wrong this year. I'm an Occam's Razor kind of guy - the simplest answer to a large part of the problem this year was that we lost key players in crucial positions and didn't have either the quality depth or the flexibility in schemes to overcome those injuries.

It's that simple. I don't need to look for things like jealousy, or people coasting because they got paid, or intangibles. All I need to see is what I just said. Injuries and lack of depth or scheme flexibility to overcome them.

Now, who people want to BLAME, that's a different story and something best left to the folks who like to talk about things like intangibles.

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Jenkins gone + Bigby gone + KGB useless + effect of KGB useless and then Jenkins being gone on DT rotation + finally losing Barnett. And again, I've already called Thompson out on his failure to keep the DL larder in good shape.

As I already said: not an excuse. I'd much rather we had the quality depth and creativity in our coaching ranks to make up for the injuries. We didn't.

But just to be clear: we're all aware that we've dealt with a crazy amount of injuries this year, right? Y'all don't think that's normal, do you? Both in number and in terms of the crucial positions that were affected, we got hit but good in the injury department.

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The real downside though was that it showed our backups were not ready. No one really has stepped up at any position enough for any of us to notice, and that is a shame. Part of that, I put on the coaching staff.

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The other part of that, I put on inexperience. Occam's Razor rears its head again.

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