Girod Street End Zone

The Goat
GSEZ Founder

Gregg Williams, 2009-2011.

Ggood bye and ggood ******* riddance.   As Patronius said, the Witchh Doctorr might turn out to have been a Quackk all along.  And we can’t say we weren’t warned, either.

http://www.girodstreetendzone.com/2011/11/27/the-report-rating-your-physician-edition/

The chickens, as Malcolm X prophesied, have come home to roost.  And the best Saints team in franchise history, on the cusp of hosting the NFC championship game and heading to an indoor Super Bowl, is going to be watching from the sidelines with the rest of us, because Gregg ******* Williams just had to prove once more that pragmatism >>> ideology every time.

You can spare me all the talk about the five turnovers, how tough the 49ers were, how we should have beaten the Rams, blah blah blah.  This is on Williams, he’s not good enough to coach the Saints, he’s not good enough to go where Drew Brees needs to go, but at least he’s gone.

 -o-o-o-o-o-

The 49ers defense is good, but even with the whole thing setting up perfectly for them, they simply couldn’t stop us at the end of the game, our OL manned up big time, and we gashed them with two fabulous comeback drives.

And this is what makes me so goddamn mad. The other team plays exactly the kind of game it wants to, it was like they wrote the script themselves, our run game is no factor, we cough up five turnovers, we get no bounces our way, we took absolutely their best shot and we still got back up and scored 18 fourth quarter points took the lead twice in the last five minutes. Our mental toughness to fight through all the shit was just amazing.  At some point, we were going to have to win a road playoff game. It should have been this one. We were good enough and strong enough on both sides of the ball to do it.

It should have been the second most satisfying win in franchise history.  But no.  Mr. One Size Blitz All had to have it his way, with yet another 3-3-5 package against a spread offense, blitzing six, and the fastest TE in the NFL, who has already burned you all game, running free on an inside route down the field.

-o-o-o-o-o-

The NFL has long had plenty of ideologues.  They are all colorful.  They like attention.   Invariably, their style is “aggressive.”  You know their names:  Buddy Ryan.  Jerry Glanville.  June Jones.  Mike Martz.  Gregg Williams.  Not colorful, but in the club, is West Coast Offense Andy Reid.  These are all smart, confident guys.  And none of them is ever, ever, ever going to win a Super Bowl running things their way.

Sometimes they can snag one by going along for the ride.  Ryan and Martz won as coordinators who stepped into organizations with a strong GM and head coach and astonishing talent on their side of the ball, as a result of which they deluded themselves into thinking victory was the result of their system and their own brilliant implementation thereof.   Williams arguably gets more credit than any of them for stepping in for the Saints Lombardi in 2009.  But there’s a reason they’re never successful as head coaches.  They’re intellectually lazy and don’t have the emotional courage to be pragmatic.  They fall back on the system, and if they don’t win, it’s not their fault.  The system’s infallible; it must be the players, or the rain, or it just didn’t work, or something.  And those, mes amis, are excuses.

Didn’t Williams mention just two weeks ago that his DBs couldn’t catch a cold if they were naked in the rain?

What’s made Payton so great is that he’s the ultimate pragmatist. Williams is a complete ideologue who’s not capable of adjusting.  And that’s why one is a great NFL head coach, and the other a vagabond stylist one step ahead of the wolves again.

-o-o-o-o-o-

In the end, we knew it should have come down to this.  At some point on that final drive, they were going to set Vernon Davis up in the slot, and we were going to single cover him and send six.  You may as well have tried to stop the rain from falling.  (Somebody please cue the BeeGees, or maybe Creedence.)

Of course, why wouldn’t you keep blitzing, no matter what the situation?  After all, it’s worked so well before, right?  Yeah, right.  Honestly, I struggle to remember once in the last two years when we had a game changing sack fumble or pick six off a blitz right when we needed it.

On the other hand, I’ve seen guys like Matt Ryan, Jake Locker, Max Hall, the late Matt Hasselbeck, Josh Freeman and A.J. Fucking Feeley and now Alex Smith beat our blitz and take games away from us over the last two years. It hasn’t worked since the surprise factor and mojo from 2009 wore off, and like most one-tool guys, Williams is at a loss to adjust. I don’t really care if our personnel aren’t that good. I’ve seen enough of those games, and none of the ones where the defense makes a big play and changes the game. Not one.

And if you’re not getting big plays, and you’re almost last in the league in takeaways, and you’re in the bottom third in the league in sacks….why are we blitzing again?  The bottom line is that Williams is just a terrible game-day coach, particularly in the fourth quarter, and we paid for it again.

What made it even worse on Saturday?  The new OT rules.  We were up three with 40 seconds to go.  The worst thing that happens is OT, right?  What happens in OT?  You score a TD on your first possession, you win no matter what.  We had just scored two consecutive TDs like they were standing still….which they almost were.  The 49ers defense was exhausted, and we were in our rhythm.  JUST DON”T GIVE UP A TOUCHDOWN AND GET ME TO OVERTIME.  If we go to overtime, who’s got the advantage?  The team that’s now scoring at will, or the one that’s struggled to drive down the field all day?  Worst case scenario is they win the toss and drive to a FG.  We get the ball back, we’re scoring something, even if it’s not a TD the first drive, all we need is one stop in OT and we’re scoring again and moving on.  But, no, we had to go for the kill shot.

If there was ever any time where the odds in favor of keeping the ball in front of you were tilted in our favor, it was Saturday.  There’s a part of me that even wonders if Payton said anything to Williams about how to play it.   I guess we’ll never know.

-o-o-o-o-o-

I know that people like to be :fair:, and they will mention things like, well, the defense kept us in that 49ers game, didn’t it?  I guess my response is, well, that’s their job.  The 49ers offense spent most of the year trying to figure out if it was mediocre, limited, or pedestrian.   We had spent the back half of the season getting our act together and had stopped teams just like that.  (IIRC we did have a massive talent infusion into the front seven in the offseason, you’d like to think he’d make at least some progress towards building a defense that can come through in the playoffs.)  

As far as keeping the guys motivated when we were down 17-0, I got this right here:  this organization focuses on bringing in high character guys, and they’re all led by Drew Brees.   That defense was going to stay motivated even if  they suddenly discovered that Williams was the bastard spawn of Richard Lewis and Eeyore.  They’re all competitiors, and they knew they were still in the game.   I concede nothing on that point.

I’ll give him some points for 2009.  Sometimes you get novelty points for unorthodoxy, and it lasts a whole season, but it also sure helps when your quarterback is going 32 for 39 and keeping Peyton Manning on the bench.  Unfortunately, the novelty always wears off, and the greatness comes when you can climb mountains with the routine.

Meanwhile, over the next two years, the defense went sideways or backwards, and none of the young players seemed to make any improvement.  The coup de grace were the road collapses late against Atlanta and Tennessee, which we got away with, and then Saturday, against an offense, and under circumstances, very much like the previous two, and this time we didn’t.  Once again, a basic 4-1-6 against a spread offense, that’s for losers.  We’ve got to have a 3-3-5 so we can blitz.  Thanks.

-o-o-o-o-o-

It’s not that Williams is a bad person.  It’s that he’s not good enough.  Right now we’re all about Great, and he’s just Good, but we’ve seen the bottom of his bag of tricks, and Great just ain’t in there.  Like the Music Man, he’s smart enough to move on.

Maybe we can get Robert Preston to install a dime package next year.

At least he’s gone, and we can move on.   We’ll have more on the free agent situation, and FWIW my preliminary a call on whether the new DC should be Mike Nolan (both Denver (2009) and Miami (2010-11) improved greatly upon his arrival), Jack Del Rio (Carolina was great when he was DC in 2002, Jax defenses historically solid and they NEVER had a QB) or Steve Spagnuolo (Giants 17, Pats 14), honestly I think you can’t go wrong with any of them.  

But that’s for another night.  I’m gonna go pour a 40 on the curb and go to bed and try to move on.

WHO DAT.

 

 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 17th, 2012 at 12:00 am and is filed under The New Orleans Saints. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.