Walking the Plank
By daveskins
Chucky walks the plank
It is tough being a head coach. Despite the fact that only 1 team makes the Super Bowl out of 32, and only 12 out of 32 make the playoffs, every fan expects that their team should win a championship off and on roughly every decade and contend more than that. Take the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Jon Gruden won a Super Bowl 5 years ago, the team’s first. And in the last few years the team has been competitive if not actually a threat to win anything.
But before this season began, there were many Bucs fans ready to fire Jon Gruden. This is not a feeling contained to Florida. Many Ravens fans want Brian Billick out. Mike Shanahan takes more heat than someone with his record should. And sadly, the whispers are starting with our very own Coach Gibbs.
Here’s the deal: Like it or not, if your favorite NFL team has won a Super Bowl since 1975 you’re team has won its fair share. Think about that for a minute. That’s Super Bowl IX (9) for those counting. Of course, I’m not saying any team should win a Super Bowl and say, “well, we have 32 years where we can suck before we try again.” Excellence demands more. Fans demand more.
But the reason I bring this up it to remind fans in Tampa and Washington of the cyclical nature of sports. And football has a special cycle which I call the quarterback cycle. Think about teams that have been good for a long time. The recent run by the Colts and Pats come to mind or the 49ers of the 80’s and 90’s or the Steelers dynasty of the 70’s. What they have in common is that each of these teams sustained excellence with good QBs at the helm.
There are exceptions. Some teams find a way to build a team around everything but a QB (the Ravens of recent vintage come to mind) or they are lucky enough to string a couple of QBs together like the 49ers did or the Redskins did in the 80’s. But generally speaking, a franchise ebbs and flows with a long running QB and then flounders until it finds another one.
For Bucs fans, it has been a tough ride because Jon Gruden has been able to make do with a series of iffy QBs and veterans making final stands. He won a Super Bowl with Brad Johnson who faded shortly after. Then we have names like Shaun King, Chis Simms, Bruce Grandkowski, and now Jeff Garcia. Garcia is making the last stand of a veteran and has the Bucs contending.
But what happens at the end of this year? Most likely, the Bucs will go into another slide while searching for a franchise QB or plugging in another veteran. And Jon Gruden will take the blame. But the blame falls on the sheer lack of QBs in the league.
And this all goes back to Joe Gibbs because right now, Jason Campbell has his coach’s fate in his hand. If he is the real deal, then coach Gibbs sets this team up for the next ten years. Otherwise, Gibbs retires and we say he “lost it” and move on. And then we will crown the next coach who is lucky enough to get a good QB here as a genius.
This is a slight simplification, of course. Coaches influence which players are taken and then their development once they arrive. To turn a blind eye toward a bad coach because they don’t have a QB is stupid. But coach Gruden, coach Gibbs, and coach Billick didn’t suddenly become bad coaches after winning Super Bowls. And the idea of firing them because they’re teams aren’t lucky enough to have one of the 10 or so QBs in the league good enough to win is even worse. And firing them because they don’t win Super Bowls every few years is unrealistic.
I hope the Redskins win this week. I hope they win so big that Bucs fans spend a week getting drunk and cursing the Skins. But the one thing I hope is that whichever team loses, the fans realize that firing the coach isn’t going to change these teams. Jason Campbell’s maturity and Jon Gruden’s ability to draft and devlop a young QB will.
-DW