This garbage about Favre's "adjustment" to the system is horseshit. The team was 8-3 and playing a bunch of losing teams. Inability to adjust to changes in defenses and gameplans caused the teams demise - otherwise known as COACHING.
While I agree with U I am still scratching my head that we are keeping $hitenheimer. We did beat undeafeted TN & NE without Brady thanks to a toss of the coin. Eventually AZ also turned into a winner right. When we 1st played Bflo they also were winners. The derailment came when Den exposed us & Man & $hitenheimer had no answer to the league after that game
I think our bad coaching was exposed long before Denver, like say Oakland and Kansas City. That coin toss in the Pats game should not have even happened, because we had the ball with about 2:11 left in the game. Then Mangini and Schotty chose to turtle up and run the ball to the inside 3 times in a row and punted the ball back to them with enough time to drive downfield (which they had begun having no trouble doing in the 2nd half) and get the ball to Moss in the endzone. We needed one stinking 1st down to ice the game and they pussied out.
Our D was exposed in the Arizona game. We couldn't stop Warner or put pressure on him for beans once Warner found his rhythm. We were not as good as we like to think we were. As Parcells would say, You are as good as your record. Yeah we were 8-3, but so what. Granted we shouldn't have collapsed like that, but maybe weren't as good as we thought. The defense had a hard time stopping people when we needed a stop. The Jets are a mediocre defense. And since we have no Receiver who stretches the field, it was only a matter of time before it caught up with us. The NFL is a players league. Coaches receive too much credit when the team wins. Players make a coaches plays look better than what they are. It is the intangibles of the player that makes the coach look like a genius.
having an entire year to learn a playbook is big. He may have never played in a regular season game, but he knew that playbook. Pennington's ability to absorb information is probably top 5 in the NFL because of how smart he is, add his work ethic on top of it, I guarantee he knew that playbook very well. Pennington is very good when it comes to study and classroom work. It was his rookie playbook, which means its the 1st NFL language he saw, that is a huge leg up. Everyone bitched and moaned about how Chad was doing so well the entire season and how Favre was still learning etc. It has a lot to do with it.
There's some debate about how much prevent we saw in the second half of the Cards' game, and AZ ended up having one of the best O's in the league. After that the D tightened up, thanks in large measure to Jenkins, before it started playing lousy again. We saw lousy play on D in the second half of the second Pats game. But I think Denver exposed the team on both sides of the ball. Yes, part of it was that they showed how the Jet receivers were really not deep threats. Whether we should say, however, that overall the Jet D is mediocre is a more complex question. Certainly the performance numbers from last year support that argument, but many here blame Sutton and Mangini for that, at least to some extent. More to the point is can some key additions make it a good D? I think so. A good CB opposite Revis would be a huge help, particularly with the kind of D Ryan wants to play. I was disappointed in the DL rotation, too. Some help there would be huge.
See here's the problem with this "Favre is the reason" shit. When your D is giving up yardage and points you need match that pace (especially since your D can't bring any points), and it changes your game plan. They automatically became pass heavy in the last stretch, when if they had at least run the ball more to set up the pass, they actually might have had more success, or at least looked better in the loss. The dude is 39....that's thirty-muddafuggin-nine. How many games can he pretend he's 29? 8, apparently. More like 6 but it's not 9 haha! (remember Buffalo won the game for us the second time around) It was mostly coaching, a lot of the D, and Favre probably single-handedly caused the rest of it. It was amateur night at the apollo, and the shit teams were the clown with the hook. Just my piece.
I take your point, but don't you think Henning's playbook has changed in eight years? And not running that offense consistently as a starter will have had a huge impact on how much Chad assimilated. We're arguing about stuff we'll never know for sure, of course! And Chad was always a bright player, so you may be right.
On the flip side of that, Favre played in the NFL for 18 years. So playbooks aside, when they come to the line of scrimmage and look over the defense, I'm sure Favre had some idea what was going on, as Pennington did.
Didn't Favre, at some point, say he never really bothered to learn the playbooks throughout his career? I'm not excusing Schotty for his pisspoor gameplans and lack of adjustments, but I bet that Favre as a QB - as a NEW QB on a NEW team with a NEW playbook - makes it a bit more difficult for an OC to properly do his job.
How can a quarterback never bother to learn the playbook??? Are you thinking of when he said he never completed OTAs?
That's why I italicized it; I think he said something along the lines of not learning all the terminology or something, and he often just went out there and winged it. I'll see if I can find the quotation...
i heard he had no clue about reading a defense in his younger days with the packers. that's all i got.
Remember the backup in Buffalo who got cut after admitting he didn't study for the game? The starter got hurt, this guy came in and shit the bed, then admitted he wasn't prepared, then got cut. I forget who it was and who the starter was at the time, it hardly matters. It was about five years ago.
Actually, I remember when Chad was drafted. I believe he asked for a copy of the playbook to take with him on his honeymoon. The guy's work ethic can definitely never be questioned.
