Quote:Do you really need to give someone 3 years or more to see what they offer? So, someone has an agenda or is a whiner because they can see trash earlier than 3 years? I remember getting flamed on here for saying Derek Cox, Alualu, Gabbert, and Anger were bad picks. How did that work out? Let me ask you somethinng, in any other job if you're trash, do they give you 3 years?

When they completely blow up the roster and take the long game approach by going extremely young?  Yes, you do.

 

Building an NFL roster isn't the same thing as any other job.  There's a timeline involved in implementing a process.  They gutted the team and got rid of pretty much everything Gene Smith brought in, starting from scratch.  They didn't race out and use free agents to rebuild, preferring to use the draft to build the core for the future.  That gives them a bigger window to completely the rebuild.  They said 3 years to start to see the transition.  4 years to compete for the playoffs.  I'm not a math genius, but I can read a calendar, and we're in year 3 right now.  This is the year where we will see the team start to make the turn.  If it doesn't happen, there will undoubtedly be change.

 

Suppose you're on a project that's a major reengineering of some corporate entity that has many moving parts and has a project plan that is 4 years long.  You know going in that there is going to be a lot of struggle along the way, but when the newly implemented procedures start to roll into the system, that there will be improvement.  Suppose you've got this boss who wants everything that is on that 4 year plan done in year 2, and when it's not, he incessantly complains about it and demands you be fired?  Did the process fail?  Or did someone not have the patience to allow it to do complete so that you could look at the end result?

 

You can't start a process, and mid-stream decide it's not working, especially if you're starting to see improvements.  Just because they're not coming fast enough for the message board GMs to be satisfied doesn't mean the team abandons the plan.  Fortunately, we've got people running the actual business who possess a little common sense not to react every time the fans whine.

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