Wrong Root Cause Analysis Leads to Failure

[2003Contenders]

I have been thinking a lot about this lately. Part of the problem that the team has run into the last decade has been brought about by the people whose power it is to make decisions, making the WRONG decisions based on warped perceptions -- in many cases from their own past history.

 

Lets start with Ralph. He had every right to fire John Butler, who was clearly going to go to San Diego no matter what Ralph offered him to stay. Butler had also left the team in horrible cap shape and recent drafts had also left the team deplete of talent. Ralph made what was at the time as astute decision to hire Tom Donahoe, a real football guy -- and gave him unprecedented control of the team. When TD failed (which I'll get to in a minute) and Ralph was forced to fire him 5 years later, Ralph came to a faulty conclusion: that the reason that the team had failed was because he (Ralph) had divorced himself of making any real football decisions and had in essence given a GM too much power. Thus, he decided not to do this again and has been keen (in both the case of Marv and Brandon) to hire guys that are not true "football" guys and did not have total control. The correct conclusion should have instead been that, perhaps, TD was not the RIGHT guy. And the correct solution to the team's existing problems would be to hire someone else that is a "real" football guy to run the day-to-day operations of the team.

 

Going back to TD... I do not feel that his time in Buffalo was a TOTAL failure. He certainly did clean up the cap mess and brought in some decent players via free agency and the draft. But the team failed to make the playoffs in his five years here, so he had to go. I believe that the biggest reason that the team stumbled so badly is because of his poor coaching hires . Both Gregg Williams and Mike Mularkey were inexperienced, smaller-than-life figures. When you understand that the whole reason why TD was available in the first place was because he had recently lost a power struggle with the larger-than-life Bill Cowher, it makes more sense. TD had probably promised himself that he would NEVER hire another coach again that would have the stones to usurp his power. So, by clinging to this paranoid fear, he was essentially spelling his own eventual doom, as his own fate would be intertwined with that of whatever coach he hired.

 

If we want to extend this even further, we can talk about Jauron, who knew heading into the season that he was on the hot seat. So what does he do? Surrounds himself with an inept group of assistants, so that there is no viable interim head coaching candidate, which of course makes it hard for Ralph to fire him in-season. Now, maybe if he had fired Turk sooner rather than later and hired a competent, experienced replacement, he wouldn't even be on the hot seat!