Watching NFL games is becoming increasingly easy. Gambling on them - not as much. But as we get into the meat of the season, it is getting much easier to read the flow of the games and the way that the games are going to end up simply by watching the idiot decisions coaches are making. I'm not going to go all Simmons here and decry the overall level of coaching in the NFL... I don't watch enough of it to make any generalizations. I can tell you what I've seen - and it ain't been pretty.
Let's do a little recap of a few teams the last two weeks and see if we can point out some failures among guys who make more than a million dollars a year.
We'll start with Brad Childress (there's a sentence that doesn't end well). Everybody can see he's a terrible coach. He is weak. He's short-sighted. He's much too conservative, and he's also stubborn. He has bad players, yes, but he's not helping anything by being there.
He has one good player, and it happens to be a great player. Adrian Peterson can't stop, won't stop. He is very fast, strong, agile, and smart. The whole package. The only thing that stopped him in college from multiple Heismans was injuries. And if you see how much punishment he can take and also give, it's no mystery how he was hurt. He's like a truck, and he never shies away from a big hit.
Luckily for opponents of the Vikings, it took Brad Childress an entire training camp and 6 weeks of the NFL season to realize this.
Before that time, he dumbly tried to make Tarvaris "My Crotch Is Busted" Jackson into Donovan McNabb - who also, coincidentally, suffered from a crotch injury. Tarvaris isn't smart enough to use a salad shooter, let alone read a defense, so perhaps turning him into a pocket passer isn't the wisest move. Troy Williamson is a soft little man, but he can run really fast up the sidelines and in the open field. You know how you should use him? Short 3 yard routes into the teeth of the defense. That won't result in his head coming off.
Childress acting stupid caused his team to tumble out of playoff contention by the 8th game. And so, in a move of desperation, he turned to his star running back and said "I don't give a hell what we're doing, you're getting the ball almost every time."
An NFL rushing record later, and he looked like a genius.
But why? What happened? Well, Childress was able to look across the field and see one of the biggest retards in NFL history on the other sideline. Norv Turner, who inherited a team that went 14 and fuck 2 last season, has them playing no better than Chippewa Falls in the Big Rivers Conference - that is to say, middle of the pack. He's got a team that is capable of spreading the field with the passing game, and also the most versatile running back in the game.
The Chargers looked over at the Vikings last Sunday and saw these things:
1. The only offense the Vikings possibly could muster would be from Adrian Peterson.
2. The only defense the Vikings possibly could muster would be in the form of shutting down runs up the middle, due to two incredibly fat men clogging up the space between the guards.
Instead of seeing how incredibly one-dimensional the Vikings were on both sides of the ball, Norv decided it would be a good idea to do these things:
1. Not focus all available defensive resources on Adrian Peterson thereby making a man named "Brooks" beat you by throwing the football (if it was a crocheting contest, I imagine Brooks would win in a walk)
2. Running LT up the middle over and over again.
You see, if it's me, I watch LT go up the middle, run into Fat Pat Blowin Killa Can't Be Denied ONE TIME, and then I say "Hmmmm.... You know, I'm not going to run that play for the rest of the game". You can't "trick" a guy like Pat Williams. He's going to be there, every single play. So if you throw the ball a hundred plays in a row, then decide "Now I'll go up the middle, this will totally fool them!", Pat's still going to be right there, and he's going to be fat.
"Coach" Childress was out-dumbed by Norv Turner, and the Vikings subsequently won hands down.
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Now we come to this week, where Mike McCarthy, who is certainly no genius, was eager to face the Vikings again because unlike most other teams, the Vikings are like a fun practice where you get to try different things and laugh all day. They're like that practice on Monday with no pads where everyone just tries trick plays and you spend the whole day trying to punt it through the uprights from the 50.
McCarthy set his sights on stopping Peterson, and did so handily. Brooks had 9 yards passing in the first half. Even when it was obvious that the Packers were keying on Peterson every play and sending multiple guys at him all the time, Childress was still running plays for him. I could just imagine him on the sideline... "Hey coach, they really seem to be going after AP..." "28 sweep left".
On the other side of the ball, the Pack stayed away from Fat Pat and ran outside the tackles for great success. They also used all of their receivers and isolated mismatches. Overall, nothing genius by McCarthy, but he realized that he was going against an inferior coach, and took the necessary steps to win the game.
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In the game of coaching, all you have to do is be smarter than your opponent and you can win with inferior talent. I'm sure there's a sliding scale of Coaching Dumbness that one could put together if one didn't have a job, but the point is that there are all different types of stupid in the NFL, and we're seeing it every week here for the Vikings. Throw Childress out against any capable coach and he's going to be eaten for breakfast. In that way, he very much reminds me of Mike Tice, and Mike Sherman. Both were so horribly stubborn and stupid, both were standing in the way of the success of their team.
I'll just say this... at least Denny Green lets his guys go play. They may suck, but at least they play.
Childress punts from his opponent's 40 yard line on fourth and 3 because his chart tells him to. That's not a coach. That's a risk analyzer for State Farm.
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