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Interesting quote from Marv


Kultarr

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My responsibilities won't be identical to what his were and I don't want them to be. I don't care about potholes in the parking lot. There are some good things here and we have to identify what we need to get better.

 

-- Marv Levy on Tom Donahoe

 

TD must have been a busy guy, micromanaging everything down to which potholes to fill in the parking lot... <_<

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The only reason TD cared about the pothole was because he hit it with his Lexus.

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Maybe.

 

Marv is a very sharp guy; and, while this quote was no doubt intended to be humorous (and it is funny in context), as is often the case humor can reveal some underlying truth about a situation. So, when I read between the lines of this comment, I hear Marv basically confirming that Tom Donahoe was micromanaging the organization. Reading Ralph Wilson's comments, which were not as funny, he frames it in much the same way.

 

Anyway, this just indicates that various "rumors" over the past few years that Donahoe was a micromanager and wasn't delegating much, if any, authority to others weren't complete nonsense, well, at least from the owner's viewpoint of the situation as well as others on the outside.

 

The relevance of this is that it might help to suggest an answer to SDS's question, "Why would Tom hire a weak coach?" The argument (paraphrasing) was that this did not make sense because TD already had all the power and the only way he could lose it was by not producing on the field.

 

The point here is that the other way TD could "lose" power was to give "his" power away. If he delegated authority to the people that worked for him and allowed them to make decisions for themselves, he would risk diminishing his power. (Somebody has to make sure the right potholes get filled on schedule, right?) From the bizarre sequence of events surrounding Mike Mularkey in his last weeks, it does seem that MM may not have been his own man. Afterall, the guy just up and quit his "dream job" for strange and often contradictory reasons according to the reports.

 

We'll never know the real story, but it is all quite curious...

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TD must have been a busy guy, micromanaging everything down to which potholes to fill in the parking lot...  <_<

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If true, that would certainly explain the deepwater ponds right in front of Lot 1 Pole 5...

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Or, perhaps we're looking too deeply into Marv's quote.

 

He could be saying that all he's going to be doing is football, whereas TD was responsible for both football and non-football operations.

 

Come to think of it, we haven't heard from Ralphie yet regarding the administration side of the organization.

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maybe that was part of his job??

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As team President he was in charge of the business opporations and I image someone has to sign the paperwork to get the potholes filled.

 

As GM is was in charge of putting together a winning team, gathering the players, contracts etc. Since the football side brings in the cash, I hope he spent the majority of his time on that and let people with business degrees handle the marketings, ticket sales, sponcership, etc side of things. However, maybe he was micro-managing and that is never a good thing.

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Or, perhaps we're looking too deeply into Marv's quote.

 

He could be saying that all he's going to be doing is football, whereas TD was responsible for both football and non-football operations.

 

Come to think of it, we haven't heard from Ralphie yet regarding the administration side of the organization.

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Of course, that is a possibility.

 

OTOH, while Levy quipped about it, Wilson cut to the chase. Basically, Wilson said that he made an error in judgement when he hired TD and gave him too much power; that part of the new "structure" was to put in place consensus management, an attempt to get everyone's buy-in, which in turn it was felt would work better than the old "structure".

 

Here is the relevant snippage...

 

...

Wilson, who handed the dour and sometimes combative Donahoe more power than any executive in team history, said it was a mistake to trust one person with the entire operation and took back the title of team president.

 

In hiring Levy, he's hoping his old coach - who took the Bills to four Super Bowls in the early 1990s - can rekindle the sense of teamwork that made Buffalo a model franchise for so long.

 

"We're bringing Marv back so that he can bring stability to the Buffalo Bills, which I'm sure he can, and bring everyone together, which is what we need here," Wilson said. "He did it with his football team. They worked together as a team or they wouldn't have gotten where they did."

...

 

Parsing this isn't rocket science. RW is pretty clearly saying that TD installed and led a factious organization that lacked stability, direction, and teamwork. (My guess would be that the first two go to the dizzying carousel of players and coaches that have spun through the organization over the last 5 years...)

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