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- The Dude
<a class="postlink" href="http://www.stltoday.com/sports/columns/bryan-burwell/firing-the-coach-not-always-the-best-answer/article_f758c00e-ca1c-5e41-a739-b0a1db05c6a8.html#ixzz1gWxmLs1H" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.stltoday.com/sports/columns/ ... z1gWxmLs1H</a>
[wrapimg=left]http://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/stltoday.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/a/a3/aa3b6b50-b79c-11e0-a797-0019bb30f31a/4e2ede60a378c.preview-300.jpg[/wrapimg]On the same dark Monday when two NFL owners were busy firing their head coaches, Rams owner Stan Kroenke watched from a distance as his team put on a rather unsightly nationally televised show on "Monday Night Football." The populist sentiment in St. Louis seems to be building toward a dramatic action by Kroenke. The populist opinion is demanding that Kroenke impose a "ready, fire, aim" approach to solving whatever ails his failing football team.
Just do something, anything, just as long as you do it in a hurry to soothe the angry Internet advocates who are screeching from behind anonymous avatars that they will stop buying their imaginary season tickets unless Kroenke responds immediately to their demands.
But Kroenke has promised no such approach. He has promised a meticulous scrutiny of the situation, and with three weeks to go in this lost season, he seems to be holding firm to his promise. But I wonder what he gathered after absorbing this snoot full of mess from Monday night's 30-13 loss to the Seattle Seahawks.
I wonder what he and whatever football people he has employed within his circle of trust were able to cull from this latest disaster. It's important to understand that Kroenke has been in the NFL for a long time as a minority owner and knows a lot of smart football people. He has built relationships with owners and other football executives and no doubt is using those relationships now to help do a lot of evaluations of what is working and what is helping to create this disaster.
And in the process of all this careful intelligence gathering, I am pretty confident that he has picked up on this bit of advice from more than a few NFL wise guys who might offer some hints about how he plans to move when this gawdawful season is done:
The key to the long-term success of some potentially gifted first-time NFL head coaches is having the ability to survive their early mistakes.
Whether it's mistakes with handling players, mistakes with handling personnel, mistakes with assembling a staff, mistakes with handling the media or public perceptions, some coaches are lucky enough to overcome their disasters or find someone willing to give them a second chance.
It's possible that a coach can struggle mightily when faced with a bad situation, then turn into a great coach. I'm not ready to compare Steve Spagnuolo to New England living legend Bill Belichick, but it bears repeating that the best coach of this generation was regarded as a failure in his first head-coaching stint in Cleveland (36-44 record between 1991 and 1995).
In Belichick's five seasons with the Browns, he went 6-10, 7-9, 7-9, 11-5 and 5-11 and was fired just before Art Modell moved the Browns to Baltimore. Six years after being fired in Cleveland, Belichick won his first Super Bowl as head coach of the Patriots.
Was New England owner Bob Kraft crazy, lucky or brilliant when he saw something special in Belichick and gave him a second chance as a head coach? Kraft relied on his own instincts, went against conventional wisdom and hired a man who most NFL people deemed a failure as a head coach.
Is there something special that Kroenke sees in Spagnuolo that with some major tweaking of the people around him could make him worth salvaging? One thing that puts Spagnuolo ahead of Belichick's development as a head coach is the way he manages his players. Belichick in Cleveland alienated his veteran players. Not until he got another crack at being a head coach did he learn the fine art of getting his players to play for him.
But looking back at Belichick's years in Cleveland, it's really difficult to understand how things didn't work out. Unlike so many first-year coaches who tend to put together inferior coaching staffs the first go-round, Belichick didn't have to overcome the weaknesses of his coaches or personnel departments. Belichick was surrounded by a coaching staff and front office that makes it even more unfathomable that he failed in Cleveland. His coaching staff was filled with some heavy hitters. Nick Saban, Kirk Ferentz, Pat Hill, Al Groh, Woody Widenhofer and Rod Dowhower. In the personnel department were people you also might have heard of. Ozzie Newsome, Scott Pioli, Mike Lombardi, Phil Savage, Jim Schwartz and Tom Dimitroff Sr.
But now here he is more than a decade later, a certain Hall of Famer and the best coach of his generation.
So miracles can come out of the rubble.
I don't know what's on Kroenke's mind, but if he thinks about keeping the best pieces of this coaching staff or personnel department, he shouldn't worry about how it plays with the public or how it will affect ticket sales to a marketplace that has turned lukewarm to the Rams.
Here's how you sell tickets to Rams games. You put together a coaching staff that makes players get better, not decline precipitously. If you already have some of them in house, you retain them. If you have some on staff who are not pulling their weight, you show them the door and you go out and aggressively scour the landscape until you find the best assistants out there. If Spagnuolo can upgrade his staff to the point where the Rams are going into games in a fair fight, it won't matter much if the fans don't accept it right away.
We've already seen what happens when you go into a season with high expectations and low results. The stands start full but empty fast. I would prefer to see how things work out if they switch things around a bit. If they under-promise and over-deliver, I will be delighted by that. If no one buys into the offseason moves enthusiastically, that is to be expected because of more than a decade of less than satisfying results. But if Kroenke makes the right decisions and puts the proper people in place to help the ones who are already here who know what they are doing, and this results in winning football games once the regular season starts, that will not only put people in the seats, but keep them there.
