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Originally Posted by DJ's left nut
That's exactly what I'm blaming them for. I'm just adding the caveat that, in light of the 'performance' of the rest of the young players on our roster, there's little reason to believe that he'd have actually progressed this far under Haley.
So I'm merely conceding that Pollard probably wouldn't have improved much here in KC, but it's not because he 'needed to wake up', it's because Todd Haley can't coach up young players.
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I wouldn't go that far. He's coached plenty of young guys as a position coordinator and was instrumental, by Fitzgerald's own admission, into helping him become an elite receiver. I think the thing with coaches is that they look for certain types of players with certain mentalities. And Pollard may not have fit that bill here. Or heck, he may have been a mistake like Donnie Edwards being let go was. It may have been a case of Pendergast thinking that Pollard wasn't going to be useful in his scheme. Whatever the case, Pollard is in a better situation right now. It didn't work here under Gunther, and it didn't work under Pendergast.
The thing I would be looking at is that it seems that Haley and even Pioli are coming from a couple of Super Bowl caliber teams, and they are starting out with the idea of a player that is a Super Bowl caliber player. This may make them think that a young guy who will never be better than OK is expendable. Pollard may be a solid player for the scheme that the Texans are running, but he'll probably never be anything more than OK unless he undergoes an extreme transformation. So Haley is probably thinking to himself that he can go get some other guy who would be more responsive to the coaching here to also come in and play OK, and that'll have to do until they find someone who can play at an elite level there.
Right now I think what we're seeing is a coach/GM who are installing a system that doesn't necessarily fit the players, and they are saying we're going to get this in place, see who can make the transition, and go out and sign/draft players who can fit in and get rid of those who can't.
My guess is that these guys believe in their systems more than anything because that's what they have used to build Super Bowl teams. And so looking at a 2-14 team, they felt that was the best way to get things right long term.
This is really on Clark Hunt. I'm sure Pioli would have made this clear prior to his hire. If he wanted to hire someone who would take the players we had, made a few tweaks, and created a system to fit the style of the players, then he could have gone that route. You could argue that with Herm and Gailey, they did a lot of conforming to the existing players, as you saw with the Pistol offense and the simplified schemes Herm ran to accommodate the young guys.
That difference in philosophy is another reason why Gailey got canned. I am assuming Haley feels the best thing for the long term of this club is to run a type of offense that he wants to employ and have guys conform to that and see who can run it and who can't, making minor adjustments here and there. Gailey probably wanted to stick with the spread type deal, which may have worked better short term, but long term maybe wasn't going to be viable in terms of building a contender.
I don't think either case is necessarily right, you have to take it situation by situation. But it appears this organization has elected to implement the hard change, and it's ugly. The only way it'll work long term of course is if moving forward, they can successfully identify guys who can be winning players on this team, they are able to sign free agents that can successfully contribute, and they can draft guys who are going to be long term cornerstones here.
Time will tell, but right now it's not pretty...