eball Posted August 5, 2012 Share Posted August 5, 2012 Read Leo Roth's article this morning about DeHaven, and it just makes me think back to how ridiculous it was for Wade Phillips to blame him for the Music City Meltdown. In the ten years that passed between DeHaven being fired by Wade and his return, his teams still were in the playoffs five times. That makes 15/23 playoff seasons for DeHaven before coming back to the Bills. The best part of the article, though, was this quote: "I’ve coached other places but I’m not sure I’ve ever been anything but a Buffalo Bill in this league." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sweatpantsjoe Posted August 5, 2012 Share Posted August 5, 2012 I was happy when this regime brought him back. It made up for the organizations blunder (or what I thought of at the time) of letting go of Bobby April. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Charles Romes Posted August 5, 2012 Share Posted August 5, 2012 I find it interesting that we have a qb coach named David Lee and a local Bills reporter named Leo Roth. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FluffHead Posted August 5, 2012 Share Posted August 5, 2012 I was happy when this regime brought him back. It made up for the organizations blunder (or what I thought of at the time) of letting go of Bobby April. The blunder was firing dehaven in 1999. Bobby April was great but he did not want to stay here after Perry Fewell was made interim coach over him. He thought it should have been him because he had the assistant head coach title Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bbb Posted August 5, 2012 Share Posted August 5, 2012 Read Leo Roth's article this morning about DeHaven, and it just makes me think back to how ridiculous it was for Wade Phillips to blame him for the Music City Meltdown. In the ten years that passed between DeHaven being fired by Wade and his return, his teams still were in the playoffs five times. That makes 15/23 playoff seasons for DeHaven before coming back to the Bills. The best part of the article, though, was this quote: "I’ve coached other places but I’m not sure I’ve ever been anything but a Buffalo Bill in this league." DeHaven's special teams were bad that whole year, and I think even for a year or two before that. It wasn't just one play. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cynical Posted August 5, 2012 Share Posted August 5, 2012 DeHaven's special teams were bad that whole year, and I think even for a year or two before that. It wasn't just one play. As bad as they were under DeHaven, they were god awful under his replacement Ronnie Jones. I blame it all on Wade. IIRC, Wade treated the special teams like they were a red headed step child. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bbb Posted August 5, 2012 Share Posted August 5, 2012 Yeah, Jones sure was not an upgrade! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
San Jose Bills Fan Posted August 5, 2012 Share Posted August 5, 2012 As bad as they were under DeHaven, they were god awful under his replacement Ronnie Jones. I blame it all on Wade. IIRC, Wade treated the special teams like they were a red headed step child. And the bolded is a really good point. It doesn't matter who the special teams coach is if the head coach doesn't consider teams to be a priority. The special teams coach can only do so much with what he's given as far as practice time allotted and which players are allowed to play on teams. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bbb Posted August 5, 2012 Share Posted August 5, 2012 Isn't that why Bobby April's special teams rankings were so bad before he got here? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hplarrm Posted August 5, 2012 Share Posted August 5, 2012 And the bolded is a really good point. It doesn't matter who the special teams coach is if the head coach doesn't consider teams to be a priority. The special teams coach can only do so much with what he's given as far as practice time allotted and which players are allowed to play on teams. While Wade laying the blame on the Home-Run Throw-up on DeHaven was incorrect, my sense is he did this because it was demanded of him that some head roll and actually the head that was at fault (I cannot say for sure whether Wade knew this or knew it but did not admit it publicly) that the fault lay with Mr. Ralph, his beancounter and his GM Butler. The real problem here was that the front office chose to manage the cap by paying more than market value for folks like John Fina (a good guy worth a lot of money but not the Tony Boselli size contract we gave him to keep him. This stemmed from IMHO the front office deciding to give both a guaranteed contract to RJ and a make good contract to Flutie. When RJ proved to be predictably injury prone and then Flutie performed as we expected him to, the cap got destroyed by having to pay 2 huge QB salaries. They then made matters worse by investing heavily in an OL to protect their QBs blindside. They then paid for this by only being able to afford youngsters making the NFL minimum to play ST and these youngsters did not do the elemental thing of staying in their lanes on the kick=off and we loss the season. Yep it was wrong to blame DeHaven but the actual fault lies with Ralph and Littman as both Butler and Wade made the Bills pay for making them force DeHaven to walk the plank. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
San Jose Bills Fan Posted August 5, 2012 Share Posted August 5, 2012 To add to the theory that DeHaven was somewhat of a scapegoat, Marv himself was a special teams coach and always gave DeHaven the latitude to make sure the teams were solid. Whether it was allotting sufficient practice time and talent, Marv was generous towards special teams. It seems like Wade treated special teams like an afterthought… certainly his hiring of Ronnie Jones (last I heard coaching high school) indicated that he thought little of special teams. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Buffalo Barbarian Posted August 5, 2012 Share Posted August 5, 2012 I was happy when this regime brought him back. It made up for the organizations blunder (or what I thought of at the time) of letting go of Bobby April. I think April's teams were better, but I think they kept more special teamers then. As bad as they were under DeHaven, they were god awful under his replacement Ronnie Jones. I blame it all on Wade. IIRC, Wade treated the special teams like they were a red headed step child. How long before we become pc for red heads Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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