Despite Record, John Fox Should Not be Fired

- This team has seen ridiculous amount of injury reducing it's already small talent base
- This team still needs to add many more pieces and wasn't a serious contender for anything this year
- This team still needs to get the QB situation figured out
- This team needs virtually a whole new secondary
- This team still needs talent added along the defensive line
- This team still needs talent aded to it's wide receiver corp
- This team needs to add more quality depth

Ya missed just a few...

We had less injuries last year. We had a lot, but not as many players on IR as there have been this year, and not as many starters went to IR last year as compared to this year.

They are two different years, and at the end of the day we may end up winning 1 less game than we did last year, even with all the injuries. We also finished last season with the toughest strength of schedule in the league last year. I could go on and on with reasons, but it really doesn't matter to some.

I don't think Del Rio is a bad defensive minded coach. Bill Bellichick would figure out a way to cheat a few more wins out of this team.

Billy I'm glad you posted this because after listening to both their interviews yesterday my conclusion was much the same.  Fangio is a no BS straight shooter.  There's no hemming and hawing.  He evaluates what's happened and speaks about it in a way that tells me he has a handle on what you do to improve on a situation.  AND he has consistently done that in the two years he's been here.

Fox on the other hand never seems to know quite what to say and always hesitates to say too much like he doesn't want to be held to anything or have much nailed down.  He paints with a very broad brush so you never really know how he views much of anything and I have yet to ever hear him take the responsibility for a bad decision on his part. 

In fact he bristles anytime a reporter even suggests something may have been a bad decision.  Then it always becomes "well we coulda done this or we coulda done that", "six of one or half dozen of another" or "it's easy for you to say eating hot dogs in your air conditioned press box but not so easy down here on the field".

Obviously not when you get so many things wrong.  So wrong in fact that most any half way knowledgeable fan can even question some of those decision logically and intelligently.  I don't like being patronized or talked down to and Fox has a bad habit of doing just that.  He's ultra defensive about any criticism whereas Fangio simply intercepts it by taking it head on even to the point of accepting the blame himself.  That's the kind of self confidence I want to see out of a HC not the kind of defensiveness we get out of Fox 24/7.

I would be shocked if Fox, Fangio and Pace are all on the same page and there isn't an undercurrent on issues.  It's pretty damn tough to figure out how there can't be when you're 3-11 this year and 9-21 over two seasons and all your HC can say is "we have a lot of work to do".  What's even more pathetic is that's exactly what he said after the 3rd preseason game and after the opener too as I recall.

So I have to ask what has our legendary "turn around artist" been doing for nearly two years if there's still this much work left to do.  Where is the promised progress and why the major regression?  For whatever reason or reasons it's not working and staying in any relationship, even an NFL one, that isn't working makes no sense to me. 

Bad marriages don't get better over time no matter if their between a man and a woman or an NFL GM and his HC.  We all knew that somewhere along the line following the Super Bowl the relationship between Lovie and JA had soured a bit and IMHO with it went any hope at all of fixing the offense and getting Cutler some help. 

A classic example of this is Lovie hires his old HC as OC. His OC doesn't like pass catching TEs and Lovie doesn't want to lose him (even though he did anyway) so to please them JA trades away a TE whose become a perennial Pro Bowler and Cutler's top pass catcher. Somehow I get this same gnawing feeling of the tail (HC) wagging the dog (GM) again when personnel decisions are being made.

No doubt Pace could use some help in the form of a mentor but IMHO John Fox might just as well be the devil when it comes to that because personnel is just one more area where he will not admit to making a mistake.  Even when he backs a player in public he can turn on that same guy on a dime like he did with Cutler when there wasn't a soul anywhere I can find who knows football who actually thought Hoyer was the better of the two and we could win more easily with him.

So once again we have some major personnel decisions to make this offseason Cutler and AJ being among them and I'm very uncomfortable with John Fox being a part of that process.  He's seldom been right since he got here and I simply don't trust his judgement anymore than I do his coaching skills.  I think he's too thin skinned and he will manipulate anyone and anything to take the focus off his own shortcomings and project them on to someone else.  That is the John Fox I've learned about over the past 6 years or so.