Ties suck.
Ties when your defense played abysmal…suck less
Love threw for 334 yards and 3 TDS and had a QB rating of 118, Jacobs racked up 157 yards of total offense including 86 on the ground, Wilson ran for 45 yards plus 37 in the air for a total of 82, and Doubs, Golden, and Kraft each came within 2-4 yards of 60. Our playmakers did their job; they made plays. Over and over and over again, all night long, and they put up damned near 500 yards. They answered the bell.
But no matter how well they played, they were simply unable to get back all the points the defense gave up, or make up for the ****** play of the special teams. If ST had done their job, we win this in regulation. I'm not sure how much more you can ask of an offense than 489 total yards, 325 passing, 164 rushing, 37 points in regulation, and 6.1 yards per play.
Except, of course, to maybe not take so many stupid penalties. But I do believe getting Belton, Banks, and Tom back will fix a lot of that. With all these practice squad bodies, the line is not consistently working as a single entity composed of 5 interconnected parts, like a good O-line should do
But aside from that, the offense did their job just keeping us in the game. The loss is almost all on the D, the special teams, and (frankly), once again, the uninspired and vanilla coaching - playing not to lose whenever the pressure is on. The thing that occurs to me over and over when the game is on the line is that Lafleur is coaching scared.
The designated assistant head coach almost always does this. I think the first thing I'd do if nothing else is remove that designation from Rich and tell him solely focus on ST, cuz that **** gotta change. He's been that since March of 2023....a year and few days after we hired him in Feb of 2022.
I completely agree, but Lafleur tends to be too loyal to his staff - a good head coach needs to be a **** sometimes and put the team's best interests ahead of friendship. One more way in which he's too timid, IMO.
NOW if it's a thing where MLF actually designs everything and perhaps even at times does the calling (scripted series at start or out of breaks/halftime/timeouts and such) I could see this work.
I was thinking the same thing this morning. I don't want to lose his offensive mind, but I think he's a guy who's not very good at multitasking in a rapidly changing situation and/or under presssure, and in order to be effective in his most important role (head coach), he needs to eliminate and delegate some of the other tasks he has taken on.
Edited to correct a rogue stat.
