hawaiianboy said:
I know you don't want to hear it, but supposedly Link Kennedy said on KNBR Monday that he heard from someone directly in the Raiders organization that a big announcement is coming Wednesday when the team comes back... Of course speculation is that Walsh has been reassigned... These rumors are most often toothless/wishful thinking, but with Brown, Kennedy, Madden and Gannon less than complementry about the offense scheme/production over the last 3 weeks or so, Al may just pull the plug...
Who says I don't want to hear it? I see the problem as bigger than Walsh, but that doesn't mean I'm not evaluating him. I've never said Walsh is great. I've never said he's doing everything well. I've been saying it's too soon, and the situation hasn't allowed a proper evaluation.
The funny thing is, I was at lunch today drawing up ways to spread the field using 2 WR, 2 TE's and 1 RB and keep a lane for the RB so the QB doesn't have to loft the ball over the DE. What I liked best was putting the RB 4-5 yards deep on the guard's outside leg. It's not completely balanced as a run formation, but it does allow you to run a bunch/flood concept to the RB side. you can keep your front-side or back-side TE in to block or send the TE's out and keep the RB in.
Our play mix has been awkward, our execution spotty, and our response to blitzes essentially uniform (keep more blockers in).
I'll tell you, if I was the GM, I'd have already had performance threshholds in place. I wasn't too concerned about where we were going until last week when we slid back to weeks 1 and 2. We should have been better against Pittsburgh on offense, no question about it. Watching Dallas Sunday should have been enough for anyone to see what can be done with a rookie QB.
Part of my ongoing analysis has been to look for signs of progress. Up until Sunday I saw some. Sunday, to me, was indicative of disorganization. An organized approach should have relatively organized progress. Without a significantly new gameplan, we slid backwards to day one. Even allowing for one more week and game Monday, and getting what would reasonably be considered progress from Week 7, I'd be concerned about a repeat of the Pittsburgh performance at random intervals in the future.
We were better against Denver and Arizona. If our offense had been as coherent as it was against Denver I wouldn't have been too upset. It wasn't. It was scattered. It seemed to be testing things instead of establishing a methodology. And I especially didn't like play action against run blitzes with deep routes. We took our RB's out of the best position to pass block. Ugly. I see that as a gross miscalculation.
I'm not as concerned about needing things like screen/swing/flat passes and 3-step drops as some people are. I think 5-7 step drops can work in today's NFL. And I 've seen plays in Walsh's offense that can be put together to make us successful. What I haven't seen is us consistently executing our plays. Not just players screwing up now and then, but a seemingly random manner of execution breakdowns that indicate disorganization. Whether that is a practice issue, or a planning issue, I can't be certain since I'm not privvy to those sessions. But certain complementary elements of the offense don't appear to be drilled enough (like screens and swing passes). When is the last time we ran a TE screen? I think it was week 2. Do we leave those things out of the game plan because we dropped every one of them? We run 1 or 2 RB screens a week, every one of them has looked unrehearsed. I'm far more concerned about those things. It's why I keep going back to execution. I don't think we're doing the things we need to be doing in practice, and I don't think we're getting solid game planning.
I was encouraged by Denver and Arizona, but Sunday made those performances look like luck, not like part of a plan.
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