[GTripp0012]

We don't show any specific signs of being a poorly coached team. If you limit the assessment to just the interaction between the coaches and the players, the players respect the coaches and they respond to them, so it's not that we're suffering from being a poorly coached team.

We are suffering from being a bad team, particularly on the offensive side. And so then you have to ask questions. What were the reasonable expectations for this year. Contention in the NFC East. Internally, that sounds like it was pretty much the case. We expected to beat teams like the Giants, Cowboys, and Eagles with our current personnel. If not, I doubt we would have built the team this way. So far, we're 1-2 on offense, but the pass defense has shown up three straight times.

What's troubling about the coaching is not that the offense isn't good, but that the coaches wanted you to believe this would work. Just trust us, they said. John Beck is better than you think. Rex Grossman is better than you think. Chris Chester is the missing piece of our offensive line. We'll manage the situation, and we'll use the running game. We'll make it work.

I don't know if they were necessarily wrong so much as that they thought they themselves (Kyle and Mike Shanahan) were the missing link in the chain that would make all of this effort worth it. But if Mike Shanahan was planning on building a team in his own image that wins on discipline, on down and distance, and on a couple of big plays a game, he picked the wrong guy to call that offense.

Mike was being silly to think that he could be hands off with the offense, and still build it in his own image. He should have built an offense that Kyle can win with: doesn't run much, but it can drop back 45 times per game and hit open receivers. He hasn't built that. He's not even building towards that. Our head coach and OC aren't anywhere near the same page. And we can't fix that. Because they have a relationship that goes beyond their professional one.