How can anyone who knows football not have serious questions about Fisher's talent acquisition and development skills! The free agency acquisitions have been lamentable for the most part. The design of the offense is built to lose. Teams will shut down Gurley and the Fisher offense won't be able to do enough to win 10, 11, 12, 13 games. All the losing has made Ram fans ready to settle for a mere shot at achieving 9-7. Fisher believes in Case. That alone would be enough to question his decision making ability. The team isn't well-coached on game day as the ridiculous amount of penalties indicates. If you like losing seasons and a mediocre record, by all means drink the kool-aide.
Are you talking about offense or defense? Because if it's the latter, I have absolutely no questions about his talent acquisition and development skills. Out of the defensive free agents signed by the Rams since he's been here, none of them have been an outright bust. Some might argue with Finnegan, but he played well the first year, and helped quickly infuse the Rams defense with a much needed attitude adjustment. I don't think anyone would have predicted his sudden decline in his second year, but that was injury driven and that's always a risk. Still, the contract for Finnegan was written in a very team-friendly way so that he could be cut with very minimal cap ramifications.
Other than Finnegan, the defensive free agent signings have ranged from decent (e.g., Akeem Ayers), to good (Nick Fairly), to utterly f**king outstanding (William Hayes). I'll take his record of free agent signings on that side of the ball all day long.
As for drafting and developing defensive players, the only arguable "miss" among those has been Brandon McGee, and that was, like Finnegan, largely injury driven. Other than that, our defensive draft picks have been at worst, pretty damn good, and sometimes utterly spectacularly great (
see Donald, Aaron). We've got enough depth at DB that we could lose two starters of the caliber of Jenkins and McLeod such that we have multiple potential plug and play replacements on the roster. And the fact that both of those guys were able to go out and earn such large FA contracts also speaks to Fisher's ability to develop defensive players.
If you want to talk about offense, that's a different story. It's been more hit or miss there, and often times there has been too much emphasis on drafting guys based on physical potential rather than demonstrated on-field production (e.g., Brian Quick over Alshon Jeffrey, for one). But he and Les also drafted Todd Gurley and Tavon Austin, who have both shown they can play at this level. Still, I too have problems at times with his overly conservative mentality on offense, so I think there is some criticism warranted there. It's clear which side of the ball on which Fisher needs to improve.
As for the QB issue, see MojoRam's post on it up thread. I don't blame Fisher for the sh!tty luck the Rams have had with that spot during his tenure.
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