Whether you hate Whitlock or not, read this article:
http://www.chiefsplanet.com/BB/printthread.php?t=105229
I wish I could also track down an ESPN Insider article years ago that ripped on Stiles big time and called him one of the worst personnel guys in the game. They said he did all of his evaluations through recommendations from college coaches within his network and that he did very limited actual scouting. Case-in-point, this is the same dumb shit who had no idea who Ben Roethlisberger was going into the draft. Can you believe that? How do you not know about a QB as highly rated as Big Ben?
You're basically suggesting that Vermeil deserves a lot of blame for drafting errors, but I will continue to ask why a GM would give a coach that kind of power and why the VP Personnel was so incompetent that he didn't know these guys were going to be failures? And then I'll ask why a Personnel guy, whose main job, by the way, is to make good draft picks and good free agency moves, wasn't fired after a long string of incompetence. It's like this. If you're building a home and your electrician is so incompetent that your carpenter ends up doing all the electrical work, whose fault is it when your electric is all screwed up? I would blame the electrician first for being a dumb shit at what he's supposed to be good at. And I'd blame the contractor who hired the guy in the first place. Why are you going to blame a guy who was doing something that's outside his job description?
Vermeil's job isn't to scout, collect data, and draft players. His job is to provide input so that the Personnel guy, who is supposed to specialize in personnel decisions, can make more informed decisions. If Vermeil had too much power, SHAME on Carl Peterson for giving it to him. In a good organization, a coach wouldn't have that much input for one, and the VP Personnel would have enough information to tell the head coach he was wrong. None of that happened. And so, a coach who was supposed to make INPUT ended up being the guy that made DECISIONS. Does Vermeil deserve some blame? Of course. But in a good organization, he would have been vetoed.