Poor personnel management and coaching. This team is talented, but it's young. And that was my biggest concern coming into 2016 with all of these high expectations and love we were getting from the mainstream. We really don't have enough veterans on this team to keep the young guys grounded and focused when they suffer a loss. And when it becomes a habit it becomes a NASTY habit. And that's what we've seen all year. Too many guys trying to make plays that aren't there. Or, guys trying to compensate or pick-up the slack on one side of the team to make up for the other. That's on your coaching staff and general manager for not figuring out a proper way to balance out the team. Bradley's overall decision making with his coaching staff has always been an issue and concern. He used the buddy system to get Babich here. That backfired. And then he had an odd interview process earlier this year to inevitably replace him with an in house coach in Wash. 

 

Now, in fairness. Wash seems to be the right coach for this defense. It's not perfect overall. It's not elite by any means. But it's good enough to keep us in games this year and for the first time in a long time it actually looks like we're disguising our schemes and blitzing from different angles and getting off the field on third downs. But Bradley's decision to hire and fire Fisch, who never ran an offense in the NFL before coming here. And then to replace him with Olson who was a QB coach here with Gabbert, and, was responsible for Freeman's one year hit wonder and fall off. And then with him coming over from Oakland with the 32nd ranked offense only to replace your 31st ranked offense was beyond a head scratching moment. 

 

2015's offensive output was a fluke and the results were truly based off of games that were mostly out of reach and no longer a contest. So now when we arrived to 2016 and we finally had a defense that could maintain the game in the first half. Our offense simply could not respond. They didn't know how to make heads from tails. They weren't used to seeing different schemes like they did this year. They weren't expecting Robinson to get taken out of the equation by a well coached defense and scheme that knows how to do that. I've said it a lot this year. But when you look at guys like Brown, Jones, Beckham, Green and Fitzgerald. Those guys don't sit still. They're moved in and out of the various receiving positions on the field to get them open one way or another. They don't just always go out there and line-up at the same position. I haven't seen them use Robinson like that at all that much this year under Olson or Hackett. 

 

But that's really been the biggest issue since day one. Poor coaching, poor personnel management and poor decision making which has sand trapped a very young and talented roster overall. This entire front office drank the kool-aid that was being passed around. That's why Caldwell focused virtually his entire off-season to fixing the defense this year because it was seen as this team's great bane last year. This offense was over hyped and praised for garbage time production in 2015 despite the fact that our quarterback was still making mistakes with the football, forcing passes that weren't there and fumbling it away with poor awareness in the pocket. Which this year, you can't say he's had no time because that's been arguably one of the biggest improvements we've seen in four years so far is the pass protection. The run blocking was poor earlier on, but now after seeing the last few weeks of production under Hackett's play calling it may have just been an issue with Olson all along. 

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