The Ravens game in some ways feels like a microcosm of many of the issues that have plagued us under LaFleur. I've said it before but it feels like we are often the "nail" rather than the "hammer," or that we are a good example of that old Mike Tyson quote, "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face."
Not to say it is always the case but I think there are a lot of teams who come into games understanding that if they can just out-physical us from the jump, we will never recover. Teams get one good "shot" on us and it throws us off for the whole game.
Now to be fair there are a lot of teams who have suffered under the "Henry-hammer," so that is somewhat a mitigating circumstance, but at the same time it's not like it was some secret as to what the Ravens were going to do. Their game plan was pretty obvious and we were basically powerless to stop it. Is that a matter of just not having the bodies/talent to do so? Probably some factor, but at the same time Henry has faced some "worse" defenses on paper and had less success. Overall it has not been a great year by his standards.
Overall though I'm kind of feeling more and more like this is one of those cases where teams take on the personality of their coach. I think Matt is a good guy, but he doesn't exactly convey a ton of authority or toughness, and I think that contributes to our team having a bit of a "soft" reputation (I don't know if this is something explicitly spoken of, but again I just get the sense that not many teams are scared of us and many feel they can simply out-physical us into a win). Look no further than Dan Campbell's Lions for an example of the opposite (that's not to say I want a coach JUST like Campbell, just talking about this specific personality-trait). He is tough, gritty, intimidating. And in short order the Lions - which had pretty much been a joke franchise for much of the 2000s - turned into a bunch of physical, cocky, chippy SOBs. For better or worse they pretty clearly take after their coach(es).
We have a coach who talks in just about every press conference about taking responsibilities for things, but little changes. Consequently, we seem to have a team that lacks for responsibility/accountability. We have a coach who often looks stumped or off-kilter when trying to manage late game situations and it lends to a team which appears undisciplined or sloppy in crunch time situations. We have a coach who doesn't seem to be consistent in his approaches (when to be aggressive, when to be conservative, when to be respectful vs confrontational, when to chew up clock vs when to play fast, etc) and so we have a team who also doesn't seem to put out a very consistent product.
Now of course that's not to absolve the players of responsibility entirely, or that a new coach would fix all of these things. But as I have said many times before, in coaching, the stuff that happens under your charge...you're either encouraging/teaching/coaching it to happen, or you're at least accepting/allowing it to happen. Yes the players do bear their share of responsibility for these issues but at the same time I get the sense that many of them have simply been taught that it is acceptable, allowed, and/or tolerated, if not encouraged outright.
