I would be curious to see other teams' breakdowns as well. I will say, something I have heard in recent years (from more teams than just ours) is that the new(ish) CBA limits/reduces the available practice time during the week. So I think in some ways teams are having to be a bit more judicious about how they "ration" their practice time. Every live rep you give to ST is one you're taking away from the offense or the defense. I'm not sure what the "ratio" is there, you could probably make a case that it needs to be tweaked a bit though. But I don't know either if we're outside the norm on that or not.
I would agree on this, although I was under the impression some of that would fall under the responsibility of the assistant head coach. Broadly speaking I think there is not a great deal of accountability going on.
This is probably the biggest one for me. Again I would have to compare to other teams to be sure....but it has at least felt like we have a tendency to view the bottom of the roster as our "developmental" spots. It's where we stash our late round draft picks, UDFAs, fringe roster players, guys we don't want poached, basically anyone we think COULD have an impact in the near (or semi-near) future. On the other hand I think you see other teams take a different philosophy - they use those spots more for dedicated "special teamers." For us we pretty much fill them out with our developmental players and then ask/expect those guys to also take on ST roles. It's not really in their wheelhouse (and a lot of them are young/inexperienced in the league in general)
I agree with all the reasons you've outlined above, but I think Bisaccia's gotta bear some culpability there. We've consistently had one of the worst special teams units in the league with him here. Now to be fair, that was largely the case before he arrived, but Rich is the highest-paid ST coordinator in the league. We promoted him to assistant head coach, and...it seems to have had no tangible benefit whatsoever. If anything, it didn't help out LaFleur with in-game decisions and our ST suffered. We've even started to reserve some more "ST only" roster spots and it still hasn't changed any. The whole McManus situation (Is he healthy? Is he hurt? Are we going to keep two kickers rostered indefinitely? Who's kicking this week? Is he healthy enough to start, but not healthy enough to kick long distances) was an absolute debacle. We've got the worst punt-return unit in the league, and our kick return and FG/XP units are all well below average.
Maybe some of that is due to circumstances outside of his control, and maybe a new coach won't be an instant fix, but at the end of the day you can't be the highest-paid in the league at your role while consistently producing some of the worst results in the league for your entire time in that role. If I'm a branch manager and my sales numbers are consistently the worst in my company's division, context or not I'm gonna have to answer for that.
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