abNORMal
Active Roster
And best of all...If JJ wasn't our coach we would not have had the joyous Wannastedt years to celebrate!!!!
(it's called sarcasm, I learned it from my wife.)
(it's called sarcasm, I learned it from my wife.)
J.J. a littled overrated in drafting
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ohall
A Miami Dolphins fan, not a players fan.
abNORMal said:
Well there's no denying that. That was JJ's biggest mistake.
LarryFinFan
Left So Fla, never the Fins...
ohall said:
You may be right about his passion for the game, but the "mess" as you describe wasn't as bad as all that....the issue is that when a new coach comes in....any new coach....he will change the personnel to suit his style..that is why we probably won't see ZT and JT here much longer and why those two wouldn't be gone if their cap hit were so high. Shues tried with one last gasp to hit the big time again...I can't fault him for that and we did have some talent on the team...they just never melded together....but he did that for Marino's sake, not for his sake...his legacy was and is intact. He wanted Marino to have a legit shot..it just didn't work out...
JJ came in and did his thing, changed the team to his liking. We needed change to our team then. But he was a terrible talent evaluator. That was proven in ALL of his drafts with Dallas and with us...IF not for the Walker trade, his coaching legacy would be completely different. He believed that if you had enough picks, you would hit on some that were diamonds. He only hit on about 30% or less of his draft choices and only a few were really diamonds...most were cubic syrconiums (sp). That is not very good, as opposed to Billick or BB where most of their draft choices make contributions to the team.
Wanny was a JJ wannabee that did to us what he did to ChiTown...drove the team into the ground with poor talent evaluation, poor decision making, poor coaching and poor cap management.
Now we have Saban...he seems to be doing the right things. We will have to wait and see....
ohall
A Miami Dolphins fan, not a players fan.
LarryFinFan said:
It was a mess that Shu's left. Not to say Shu's couldn't have fixed things, but at that time it was painfully obvious he lost the ability to chose top flight players from the draft.
I can't fault Shu's for doing what he did either. I was all for the moves he made, we all were. We all wanted to see him go out with another title.
NathanHunt
Fluff Girls are underpaid.
Can we all agree we've never truly had the reputation of being a drafting team?
There's no reason to pick 1 or 2 years when really, there are many to choose from.
I agree the draft is a crap shoot. But, I also believe there IS a reasonable level of scouting and evaluation that can yield a good drafting history. Let's face it, defense is easier to draft than offense. And, usually the teams with solid draft track records in recent years (Baltimore, Tennessee, Dallas, Houston, Pittsburgh) find players that work in their systems. They USUALLY don't "reach" and they rarely make a lot of movement up or down during draft day. They stick to their boards and draft at their original spots.
I would have to say, Houston has done just as well as anyone drafting offense. Carr, Davis, Johnson, Gaffney, Wells, Miller and others have been "solid" picks. Not elite picks, but solid picks. And, offensively, that's a pretty good record considering how many busts other teams have had.
One point was made earlier that I think might stand true for Saban.
I am reminded of the "leaks" about how Saban relied on his college player knowledge for this draft. And, as you can tell, he did stay relatively close to the SEC for talent. I HOPE he eventually learns to trust someone within the organization enough to build a real talent scounting department. And, maybe that's what he is doing with Speilman right now.
I know many people hate Speilman, but I for one hopes he gets a FAIR chance. I think Saban is going to allow Feeley every chance as a measuring stick for Rick. I don't see Saban relying so much on his own player knowledge for next year's draft. If he does, we could be in for JJ Part 3. (Wanny was part 2)
Completely honest, it's time for fans to realize, the Phinz have honestly had major deficiencies across the entire organization for MANY YEARS. We truly have yet to replace the Shula/Marino legacy.
There's no reason to pick 1 or 2 years when really, there are many to choose from.
I agree the draft is a crap shoot. But, I also believe there IS a reasonable level of scouting and evaluation that can yield a good drafting history. Let's face it, defense is easier to draft than offense. And, usually the teams with solid draft track records in recent years (Baltimore, Tennessee, Dallas, Houston, Pittsburgh) find players that work in their systems. They USUALLY don't "reach" and they rarely make a lot of movement up or down during draft day. They stick to their boards and draft at their original spots.
I would have to say, Houston has done just as well as anyone drafting offense. Carr, Davis, Johnson, Gaffney, Wells, Miller and others have been "solid" picks. Not elite picks, but solid picks. And, offensively, that's a pretty good record considering how many busts other teams have had.
One point was made earlier that I think might stand true for Saban.
abNORMal said:
I am reminded of the "leaks" about how Saban relied on his college player knowledge for this draft. And, as you can tell, he did stay relatively close to the SEC for talent. I HOPE he eventually learns to trust someone within the organization enough to build a real talent scounting department. And, maybe that's what he is doing with Speilman right now.
I know many people hate Speilman, but I for one hopes he gets a FAIR chance. I think Saban is going to allow Feeley every chance as a measuring stick for Rick. I don't see Saban relying so much on his own player knowledge for next year's draft. If he does, we could be in for JJ Part 3. (Wanny was part 2)
Completely honest, it's time for fans to realize, the Phinz have honestly had major deficiencies across the entire organization for MANY YEARS. We truly have yet to replace the Shula/Marino legacy.
Ferretsquig said:
Man..I feel your pain. I thought the same damn thing...Grrrrrrr :D
miami_mi said:
It wasn't one bad year for JJ here, his drafts on the offensive side were really bad, Yatil Green was an injury prone underachiever at UM, big reach where we picked him, John Avery was a big reach where we picked him.
I'm quite sure a part of what made JJ lose interest was his own inability to draft well here, he could see the writing on the wall of what the future would bring with his poor drafting here, he didn't want to spend the time it would take to make up for those bad drafts so he bailed.
Take a good hard look at the drafting of the Ravens over a long period of time, you can do a lot better on average than JJ did.
Dennis Green is another guy who has consistently drafted well, go back and look at his Vikings drafts and now with Arizona.
BlueFin said:
Yatil wasnt a reach....he had a injury record but was a sound pick (IMO)..he was also not an underachiever. He had a career ending injury right from the start.
Having said that..I must agree w/ your reference on Baltimore and Denny Green......solid from all angles....
CrunchTime
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IMO Shula's biggest flaw was that he hung on to underlings too long even after it was clear that some of those people were not doing their job well.Personnel evaluations was one of those areas.
ohall said:
It simply made no sense to take away Dan's ability to audible, IMO that was a clear case of a power play by JJ, Dan was by that time an expert at it.
JJ should have kept his focus on the defense and let Dan run the offense, that was the best chance this team had to be successful at that time.
The last season was a little different, Dan had injury problems that year and we really had nobody else, it was a bad way to end it.
JJ's worst mistakes here were IMO in not assembling a good staff around himself, Kippy Brown was an absolute joke as an OC. When you compare the staff Saban has assembled there is really no comparison.
Dbergan said:
How can you say a guy that had shown himself to be injury prone, that had averaged less than 400 yards per season receiving over the course of 3 years at UM wasn't a reach at pick #15 of the first round? He scored a total of 9 touchdowns in three years at UM.....this guy was drafted completely based on potential ignoring his production and his injury history, you should never spend a #15 pick on a guy like that, not in the first round....later yes, that is what makes it a reach.
OrangeCrush
☠️ Banned ☠️
Jaj said:
Maybe you didn't read what I said. I wasn't talking about Billick's drafting. I was talking about the orignal poster's ability to come to a conclusion of how good or bad a coach is by picking out one year and judging him by it.
My view was that, If you could pick one year of JJ (his worst year) and judge him by it. Then you could say the same think about Billick, when he was in Clevland. When he had a terrible record. Are you going to call Billick an overrated coach by judging him apon ONE YEAR. It would be stupid = my point.
FINSItalia
God of Thunder, not a bad gig
LarryFinFan said:
The mess was pretty bad if I remember correctly - we were way over the salary cap because Shula had spent tons of cash trying to build the defense through free agency in order to get him and Dan one last chance at the SB - and I'm not saying that's bad.
However, when JJ came in Cox, Vincent, and Coleman were all at the end of their contracts and we were way over the cap and had to lose our three best defensive players. JJ was able to reconfigure the team to clean up the salary cap mess and still draft enough new players from the bottom of the draft to field a team good enough to finish .500 or better. Other teams in the same situation such as SF which has never come back and Tennessee which is currently doing the rebuild and finished below .500 have not been able to turn around a team as fast.
And from a draft side, JJ wasn't trying to be good on a percentage basis. He tried to accumulate lots of picks and make some safe choices and also make take shots on hit or miss type players. If you go into a draft with six picks and choose four players that contribute that gives you a 0.667 hit rate. If you go into the draft and move down to get more picks and hit on four out of twelve you only have a 0.333 hit rate, but get the same number of contributers and maybe a chance to hit on a draft steal (see J. Taylor and Z. Thomas).
One thing that really killed him was that he was trying to get a running back and the years we were drafting there was not allot of deep RB classes so he reached on quite few RBs (and he did pass on a few good RBs). He was not strong at drafting Oline either - it would have been interesting if he had been successful in hiring Houck away from Dallas at the time. He was never able to put together a good staff here like he had in Dallas and that wss probably what prevented his success more than anything.
FinzManiac said:
I did not state he was an officially lousy drafter, I was simply starting a discussion - with really not much to talk about right now - on the fact that Jimmie was a little overrated in drafting. I did pick his worse year, but when I look at Miami's drafts with him I would give him a B. I think he got a reputation from his Dallas days - because he did draft well, but at the same time he just got out of coaching college, knew the talent well, and was loaded with picks. I do think he is a good evaluator of talent, but I thought he was a little overrated is all.