Here is why the fan view of Gus diverges from the reality of his situation.

 

To fans, Gus Bradley has been a disappointment for three straight years. He's won just 12 games in that 3 year period. He's gone 4-12, 3-13, 5-11, and even a blind polecat with no understanding of the rules of football can see that's not good enough. By now we should be a playoff team - or if not, we should be contending for the playoffs a lot more seriously than we did this year.

 

And all of this is true.

 

But the reality of his situation is this: the expectations for those first two years were set very low. It seems like the plan for the rebuild was always that those years would be as bad as they were, as the roster was gutted and built up with young (perhaps overly young) players. The expectation within the building was that those seasons would be painful, and that expectation was met. So to Shad Kahn, Gus has been a disappointment for one year. And probably not as much of a disappointment as he was to fans in that last year, because the impression seems to be that expectations were lower than they were for lots of fans this year as well. Which is understandable, because a lot of fans had extremely unreasonable expectations.

 

Here's the thing, though. Going into next year, I think expectations inside and outside are going to be starting to align a lot more closely. Sure, fans will still be over the top with their expectations and demands (playoffs or fired), but not by much. I don't think we'll have to have this discussion a year from now, because either Dave and Shad will have been proved right, and the team will have delivered under Gus (maybe not everything the fans want, but most of it), or the team will have moved on.

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