billybignuts

If Gruden wouldnt have been sent to Tampa, he wouldve gotten the axe. He wouldnt have returned to the Raiders. At least that was the story every newspaper in the country was reporting. Hell he was thinking about going to college football.

pakowitz

i dont think ditka was all that bad of a coach.... he just got the axe after ricky didnt pan out like he had hoped.... with injuries and his disorder... ditka stood behind ricky williams and williams let him down.. and ditka got fired for it

LordOfEntropy

I think Ditka was that bad a coach.

He may have been good, perhaps even great -- but only as football stood at that time. The 80\'s were 20 years ago. I don\'t believe that mindset works anymore.

Regarding Ricky letting him down, I believe too much pressure (and hope) was put on him for any rookie to hanlde. I can\'t blame him for that. But I -can- blame the head coach that allowed an entire years draft to be effectively wasted on a single individual, one that resulted in a 3-13 season as we all know.

I think Ditka -was- that bad.

can anyone help me id this tune? it goes thwap thwap boom tch boom tch boom tch.

Qui a laissez sortir les chiens!

WhoDat

Ditka was a bad SAINTS coach, not a bad coach. In an era where Passing, Offense, and Speed are all the rage, Ditka was committed to a hard-nose pound it down their throats type of play that no longer works in our era - obviously it worked very well in the mid 80\'s. I will concur that Buddy Ryan certainly helped that team - but I have long maintained that a coach\'s job is as much about surrounding himself with good assistants as anything else. If our coordinators are bad, point your finger at one place - Jim Haslett - b/c ultimately he is the instrument in deciding who fills those positions.

I don\'t remember hearing anything about Gruden getting fired in Oakland. Maybe I\'m wrong, I just don\'t remember much of anything coming out of the Bay Area other than a ton of whining about the tuck rule after Gruden\'s final season.

Bottom line is that a coach cannot do something with nothing. Most of the coaches, if not all, prior to Jimmy boy had one major disadvantage - our teams were never as talented as others. That began to change with Finks during the Mora years, then we regressed significantly with the Weasle, and have taken one giant step forward with Mueller and Loomis.

To me, it was hard to rate our coaches in the past b/c you never knew if our talent was close to other teams, or well below them. Now, I know we have more talent than most. Still, the results are not much better than they have been since the late 80\'s. So I look to the coach. You think it doesn\'t matter? Well let\'s go back to that Gruden example. He was basically one questionable call away from the Super Bowl two years ago. His successor mostly used the system that Gruden had already put in place, and it landed the Raiders in the Super Bowl. More importantly, Gruden went to a team that was consistently 9-7 or 10-6 and could never make it to the big game, and brought them to that big game in his first season. Coaching matters - it matters a lot. Go look up the stats - most coaches (in the \"modern\" era) make it to their first Super Bowl with a new team within their first three or four years. This is Haslett\'s fourth. If there is not significant improvement this year then I can say that I\'ve seen enough.

It\'s just my opinion, and it doesn\'t smell much better than that other thing we all have...

\"Excuses, excuses, excuses. That’s all anyone ever makes for the New Orleans Saints’ organization.\" - Eric Narcisse


\"Being a Saints fan is almost like being addicted to crack,\" he said.[i]\"You know you should stop, but you just can\'t.\"