I voted no.
Defenses and their coaches have figured the Hawks O out, and have equipped themselves to deal with us accordingly. When you are watching the playoffs and the SB from the comfort of your own home, you begin to start thinking of ways to keep yourself in that home. You come up with plans and schemes to defend what was successful and caused you to be sitting where you are. You are held accountable for what went wrong. So, you come up with stuff. Teams have.
For our coaches, the task at hand is to develop new twists on the same success. That means you have to try things out to see what is successful against the teams that are now tooled-up to defend you. That is a tall order, even if you have elite talent on the roster. When the talent gets a little beat up, it makes it doubly hard. When you have serious injuries, even worse.
I think at this point it could be a whole hell of a lot worse for us. We are sitting at 1-1, and were 0-2 at this point last year. That is progress, however small. The last two weeks we have faced (arguably) 2 of the most formidable defensive fronts in the league, and to come out with an even record is the best we could have hoped for with recovering talent, and recently banged up talent. Again, it could be a whole lot worse.
Being a fan of the team since the beginning, I tend to look at the whole body of work and lean on that. Without researching stats or calling-up gifs, we all can agree these have been our most successful years in team history. I am comforted by that. We have had waaayyyy worse coaching over the years and I have yet to see a clear reason to toss out the Offensive Coordinator now, beyond simply just to see if it makes things better. That is a big gamble, and not one I have decided I'm ready to see just yet.
Whether or not you want to place blame on Bevell for the call in SB 49 and not on Pete, that's fine. But they had a meeting on the sidelines that all the coaches had input on while the commercials were playing. They went with what they figured would be the best option. Belichick sent in the goalline D. The DB gambled, and he won. Great play for them. Had things been an inch or so different, we would have won and we wouldn't be having this little chat.
For an OC, it is impossible to come up with a series of plays that will create 100% success all of the time. I said it in the game-day forum yesterday; run run pass?, pass run pass?, pass pass pass?, run run run?, run pass pass?, it didn't matter. Nothing worked to throw the D out of their gameplan and get players to cheat one way or another. Up the middle?, off tackle?, around the end?, nothing worked. They looked for specific sets and played them, and did not react in a way that enabled us to expose them with audibles. We hoped to catch them in certain formations and to react a certain way, and we focused on matchups, but they prepared and were coached to react accordingly. Sometimes you can figure out how they are defending you and counter, sometimes you can't. All you can do is put the best you have in a position and the players then are tasked with making plays. To top it all off, they had a twelfth-man of their own, the refs.
Bevell didn't poke the ball out of C-Mike's hands there at the end. Bevell didn't wear number 88 yesterday and jump the snap-count in our final drive. Bevell didn't plat LT and get beat repeatedly, and Bevell didn't take 3 flags out of his back pocket for OPI when our receivers were doing what they always have done before. We were jobbed.
Yesterday I see as an anomaly. Anytime a team has it's first home game in a new stadium, with about 20 legendary players in attendance wearing gold jackets, and 900 celebrities in the stands wearing blue and yellow, we're toast. Nope, yesterday Goodell made a cell phone call, simple as that. If you need more evidence, take a look at Pete's reactions yesterday to the OPI calls. In recent memory, I can think of no other game in which he went nuts like that. He knew the calls were bad and we were being played. He knew it plain as day. No OC can overcome a SB-40 type jobbing. To believe any different is a stretch to me.
Yesterday we were simply the losing team in a celebration of the new Los Angeles Rams, and there was no way we were coming out of that game victorious. Today we are all second-guessing everything to attempt to explain it. Bevell is just a convenient spot to place blame.
