Falcons: Real Talk: Coach Smith

[Radical]

(09-26-2011 01:44 PM)Jayhawk-Falcon2012 Wrote:  If the patriots can do 2 te sets and win we sure as hell can too.

What makes them so effective though is that they have an offensive line that can get the job done the majority of the time. Those 2 TEs are quality receivers, with only one of them really known for their blocking.

We could leave Reggie Kelly or Tony Gonzalez to block all day, but then you're not going to see an offense that can put the ball down the field much any more. Regardless though, our problem is with three linemen not getting the job done, not just Baker.

[RnB]

Despite what we are trying to do now offensively, the same silliness will be posted this season Radical.

Intellectually lazy is putting it kindly. Some people just get it and others don't. Hopefully I can do a better job ignoring the obviously outlandish posts (like the OP) and still enjoy this forum.

[Radical]

(09-26-2011 01:49 PM)RnB Wrote:  Despite what we are trying to do now offensively, the same silliness will be posted this season Radical.

Intellectually lazy is putting it kindly. Some people just get it and others don't. Hopefully I can do a better job ignoring the obviously outlandish posts (like the OP) and still enjoy this forum.

Don't worry, there's plenty of room on, "the island."

[Jimusmc]

(09-26-2011 12:58 PM)Paprika Neck Wrote:  we need del rio as dcoordinator and a young and innovative oc

Josh McDaniels was there for the taking.. sigh

[Statick]

(09-26-2011 01:49 PM)RnB Wrote:  Despite what we are trying to do now offensively, the same silliness will be posted this season Radical.

Intellectually lazy is putting it kindly. Some people just get it and others don't. Hopefully I can do a better job ignoring the obviously outlandish posts (like the OP) and still enjoy this forum.

LOL. Oh, brother...

Call me outlandish and "intellectually lazy" all you want. I know what I see and I know the history of MM's offenses. The proof is there even if you all don't want to acknowledge it until it's too late.

I'm a homer to an extent, but saying all we need is an o-line is intellectually disingenious to say the least.

[Radical]

(09-26-2011 01:54 PM)Statick Wrote:  I know what I see and I know the history of MM's offenses.

If your getting your history of MM from that bullshit article you posted up, then no wonder you think the way you do.

Reading that article is like reading a Vick75/Mr. Right piece of Matt Ryan. Half truths, key facts left out, and twisted into such a diatribe of lunacy that you're at a loss on where to begin.

And going back to what you said about our offensive line. We have an offensive line, and pretty much all our problems are solved. Michael Turner is consistently rushing for 4-5 yards instead of 2 yards outside of the occasional big run, Ryan has time to sit back and go through his reads, receivers actually have time to get open down the field, and we can spread defenses out more with five guys going out on passing routes from all over the field more times than not.

[Statick]

(09-26-2011 01:57 PM)Radical Wrote:  If your getting your history of MM from that bullshit article you posted up, then no wonder you think the way you do.

Reading that article is like reading a Vick75/Mr. Right piece of Matt Ryan. Half truths, key facts left out, and twisted into such a diatribe of lunacy that you're at a loss on where to begin.

I'm not here to fight with fellow fans on how much who knows what about football, but we all can agree to disagree with what's wrong with this team and how to fix it.

I posted that article as proof that someone else besides us has experienced what we are now going through with a MM-run offense.

If you say it's all half-truths with facts left out and all twisted, then by all means, refute with facts against what I'm posting instead of attacking and using other posters from the main board (aka Tandy) to back up what you're trying to refute.

[Radical]

(09-26-2011 12:38 PM)Statick Wrote:  I wish I knew where this Steelers fan pulled this from or if they wrote it, but it's a pretty damning tell regarding MM...

"Originally touted as an offensive genius at the beginning of this decade, Mike Mularkey has rightfully lost that moniker and is approaching "bust" status as a coach.

By examining his track record one thing becomes clear. If past events predict future results, the Atlanta Falcons are in trouble offensively.

Mike Mularkey first became offensive coordinator in 2001 for the Pittsburgh Steelers. He was promoted from tights ends coach and replaced Kevin Gilbride and had his best statistical year as a coach. The Pittsburgh Steelers were ranked 3rd offensively in his first year as offensive coordinator and made the playoffs.
They were ranked 18th the previous year.

The following year, 2002, the Steelers were still excellent offensively, but slipped a bit to 5th. In 2003, the Steelers entered a free fall offensively and dropped all the way to 22nd, missing the playoffs. Mularkey began to be characterized as a coach that used predictable formations and was way too quick to abandon the run. He became reliant on the gimmick or trick play as opposed to sound play calling.

Mularkey still had a great deal of buzz and was touted as one of the up and coming new coaches in spite of the Pittsburgh offensive rankings and not making the playoffs in 2003.

He used that buzz to land the head coaching job in Buffalo, with the Bills. He replaced the fired Gregg Williams, after Williams posted back-to-back 5-11 seasons. His first year as coach in 2004, the Bills after an 0-4 start, reeled off six straight wins and finished just out of the playoffs at 9-7 after getting beat by Mularkey’s former team, the Pittsburgh Steelers back ups in week 17.
The offense for the year ended up ranked 25th up from the previous years ranking of 30th. The offensive coordinator the year before Mularkey got there?

Kevin Gilbride.

So, in the two instances in his career where Mularkey raised an offense's ranking statistically, it was done in his first year as coach and he was replacing Gilbride both times.
In 2005, the Bills dropped offensively from 25th to 28th and his handling and development of JP Losman as the quarterback to replace Drew Bledsoe is laughable at best.

Ask any Bills fan about how they feel about the job Mularkey did with Losman, and you will get an answer that will most likely force you to ask small children to leave the room to spare them the obscenity laced tirade.
Mularkey waffled back and forth and sat Losman in favor of journeyman Kelly Holcomb. Citing differences with the direction of the Bills after team President and General Manager, Tom Donahoe was fired, Mularkey quit the Bills before the start of 2006 season.
In 2006, Mularkey landed in Miami as offensive coordinator and the Dolphins promptly dropped from 14th to 20th in offensive rankings. Mularkey did not have the luxury of replacing Kevin Gilbride to inflate his first year numbers. He was then demoted to tight ends coach in 2007 before being fired at the end of the season.

For the 2008 season, Mularkey has been tapped as the offensive coordinator in Atlanta. Entering a team in disarray for the third time in a row, a team in Atlanta that has not enjoyed back to back winning seasons in its history, Mike Mularkey does not bode well for Falcons fans to reverse that trend. His first example of success, in Pittsburgh, can be attributed in large part to the stability of the organization, stability of the coaching staff, and the offensive coordinator he replaced as opposed to his measure of ability to game plan successfully.

In Buffalo, his pattern of success is very similar, a brief one year rise followed by a precipitous fall after replacing Kevin Gilbride.
His time in Miami can be only characterized as a disaster at best. One of the marks of an effective coach is the ability to say yes to the question, “Did you leave the situation in better shape than when you found it?” In each case of his head coaching or offensive coordinator stops Mike Mularkey cannot say "yes" to that question.
Simply put, Mularkey is not the answer for the Falcons.

He has not demonstrated an ability to develop rookie quarterbacks and he has never developed the team around him to be better consistently for more than one season. He has never improved a team offensively from year one to year two. So, Atlanta fans may find themselves doing better this year offensively, and after the debacle of Bobby Petrino it is hard to imagine them worse, only to begin to regress again in 2009. That is, if he doesn’t follow the pattern of his last stop in Miami where the offense got instantly worse. Who was his starting quarterback in Miami?
Joey Harrington, the same quarterback as in Atlanta.

Perhaps Mularkey will learn from his past mistakes and get something out of Joey Harrington and not develop Matt Ryan like he did JP Losman, because right now things are looking eerily similar to his past situations and that does not bode well long-term for Falcons fans.

OUCH.

1. The article looks at total yards as a measure of Mularkey's offensive performance with the Steelers. The Steelers went from 7th, to to 8th(improving in points scored though), and then 19th. It fails to mention however that he was working with "wonderful" QBs like Tommy Maddox and Kordell Stewart, a wildly inconsistent backfield, and a defense that was consistently poor when it came to scoring.

2. It doesn't mention that on Mularkey's first year there, they were 7th in the league in scoring. This included a 6 game stretch where they averaged 37 points a game. What was he working with? Drew Bledsoe, Willis McGahee, and an ancient Eric Moulds.

It gets worse as you go into 2005 though. Dealing with a management group that is infamous for meddling with the coaching staff(see Doug Flutie incident), they forced freaken JP Losman onto the field of all QBs, a guy that couldn't even complete half of his passes. There's a reason Buffalo has such a horrible reputation, and it has nothing to do with the cold weather.

3. The entire 2006 Miami Dolphins season was a wash from top to bottom. You have a joke of a coach in Nick Saban, he had to work with Joey Harrington and Cleo Lemon at QB since the "savior" QB Daunte Culpepper went down, Ronnie Brown was up and down with injuries, and their go-to receiver was Marty fucking Booker of all receivers.

He was then caught in the position of being the incumbent OC, when the new HC was supposed to be an offensive guru brought in to run his own offense. Yeah, that wasn't going to work out at all.

This article plays Mularkey off as being a goof that has had all this talent to work with, but simply fucks it up left and right. He's never even had a QB you could even call average until Matt Ryan. It's just ridiculous from top to bottom, and this isn't the first time I've broken it down. I could keep going, but repeating myself gets old quickly. People want to ride the jocks of these world beater OCs like Mike Martz... even though most of these guys only had success when they were running a Ferrari offense. Cam Cameron, Mike Martz, Brian Billick, Jon Gruden, Josh McDaniels, etc. You don't have the players, you don't succeed on offense.

[takeitdown]

(09-26-2011 01:08 PM)Radical Wrote:  Your copied article is such a ridiculous spin job that I didn't feel the need to even get into it.

Concerning your general complaint about Mularkey, I'm convinced that some people just want success, and they don't care how, and they don't understand what makes success.

People throw around that we should do this more, or do that more, or wonder why we do this or that, and simply don't understand why it's going on and what happens when we try things differently.

People wanted us to spread the defense out more, send 5 guys out on pass patterns, and not run so much. What happens? Our mediocre offensive line, now hobbled by an aging C coming off injury and a first time starter in Reynolds, is getting by just 3-4 pass rushers almost instantly.

How do you fix that? You run the ball, leave in extra blockers, and run short timing based routes that can be quickly thrown to a spot for an easy completion. Well, now you're not "explosive" and you're "predictable."

People want to scream about Turner not being elusive and being slow... when he's getting hit 2-3 yards behind the LOS. People want to ignorantly rant on about how Matt Ryan needs to start chucking it down the field. Others want to mouth off about how Mularkey needs to use "run better routes." Blah blah blah, I've heard it all. The reality is that it all comes back to the offensive line. You give us an above average line instead of the garbage happening on the field right now, we wouldn't be having any problems at all.

There is no scheme, play, playbook, system, philosophy, etc. that can overcome an offensive line that gets beat consistently by the defensive line of the other team. None, nada, and that's all there is to it. Our offensive line shapes up, and you see a Top 5 offensive. Our offensive line continues, then you can change the OC 50 times, and you're still going to see different looking versions of the same results.

It can be both. I've posted in many places that if our interior OL were just above average we'd be 2-1 or 3-0 right now, and would be a 12-4 type team (basically like last year, but a bit more explosive.) With the interior OL being blown up, there's nothing much that can be done.

That said, it doesn't absolve Mularkey. You can have a bad OL AND bad playcalling. You and I have had the debate, so we don't need to go into it, but just assume the interior OL were above avg. In that case, having 3 to 5 people who can go out for passes actually HELPS the OL, because it's a lot of different people blitzers have to account for, and there's usually a guy open quickly. I don't think Mularkey excels at this. However, you're right, that right now, with the interior OL acting as it is, the rest is irrelevant.

[Negatron]

(09-26-2011 12:08 PM)Statick Wrote:  I'd like to ask Coach exactly how bad does the offensive situation have to get before he swallows his pride and admits that what Mike Mularkey is doing for an offensive gameplan is no longer working? And that Sam Baker and Reynolds aren't exactly getting the job done at their prospective positions on the o-line?

I'd also like to ask him why does it take us spotting the opposing team 10 points before we make major decisions, such as going to the no-huddle or Matt calling his own plays?

I know I don't know everything that's going on behind the scenes to make an informed judgment, but one cannot ignore what's been going on for the past year and a half. I figure either Smitty wants to give his coordinators a chance to do better. I just hope it's not an ego thing with him in that he's just going to roll with what he has due to not wanting to admit he was wrong in choosing his personnel.

Exactly what is it going to take? Matt going down with an injury before he finally wakes up and cans Mike Mularkey? Or realizes that Baker peaked last year or that Reynolds (a converted T) isn't a G?

To his credit, BVG has stepped up his game and has done pretty well calling the plays at DC the past two games. Mike Mularkey, unfortunately, hasn't changed a bit. He's still predictable as ever and shows no signs at changing his gameplan, which is the same style that got him fired at Buffalo and Pittsburgh.

Wake up, coach.

Mike Smith is not assertive at all. you can see it in his mannerisms, the way he talks and the way he acts. he just doesn't come off as a good leader or decision maker to me. I could be wrong, but i just don't see how a guy like that ever has the balls to fire his coordinators. He will go down with the ship.