While there are many who hail Holmgren as some sort of coaching messiah, I just don't agree. His team in Green Bay went to the Super Bowl due to remarkably good personnel decisions. Jim Mora could have won a Super Bowl with that squad.
In our years of dominance, we had loads of talent who never fully panned out. The result was a locker room full of divas and malcontents, and Holmgren never bothered to rein it in. In my opinion, the single biggest mark of a good coach is maintaining locker room chemistry and turning that chemistry into wins on the field. With Holmgren-led teams a win was often followed by a heartbreaking loss, the kind that just drive daggers in your stomach. The kind that make you say "how the hell could we have lost this so badly?"
It made me sick to my stomach in 2008 when Holmgren, along with the entire team (who didn't care for him), mailed in the entire season to a 4-12 record, then at the end of the season when everyone is looking forward to a new coaching era, in an ego-fueled last ditch effort to preserve his "legacy", Holmgren starts prodding the front office for an extension, which they thankfully declined.
In my opinion, the 2005 Seahawks are the best team we've ever fielded, but Holmgren is nowhere near the best coach we've had. That honor should belong to Chuck Knox. Holmgren's teams had all the talent in the world but underachieved year after year after year, which suggests systemic coaching failure to me. He was by no means the disaster that Tom Flores was, but I consider him to be roughly on par with Dennis Erickson. The guy knew offense (though his offenses were pretty inconsistent post-'05), but under his regime there were always deficiencies on defense and special teams as they were merely an afterthought. His refusal to field Jason Babin confounds me to this day.
So, in summation, it's by no means a surprise to me that he totally screwed the pooch in Cleveland. He might have been over tasked while performing front office duties in Seattle but I think it should be plainly obvious by now that he is an abject failure in that role. The guy would be a great offensive coordinator if it were 1994, so long as he was not given any power whatsoever over personnel decisions. It's about time he hung it up for good as the NFL is evolving and he's refusing to adapt.