We were poised to make a giant leap last year too. We were 3-0, winning challenging games along the way. We put ourselves in position to win a wild card with a single win by beating Pittsburgh and New England in very hotly contested games. We blew both things royally. Why? Because our coaching staff, most of which we retained, is inept, and incapable of managing a football game in such a way that making more plays than the other team and having at times vastly more talented players will turn into a win. Regardless of opponent, the script for nearly every game was the same and came down to the wire in plays that were either made by seeming sheer luck giving us a win or continued bad plays when it actually mattered to get a loss. Somehow a guy in New York who seems to have a dearth of talent and one of the worst offenses in the league year in and year out can turn in the same or better records than us, and maintain a job despite lacking real success for years, because his team wins games in which the plays made in the game put them in position to win, which happens to be less games than our team. We just convert a drastically lower percentage of these games into wins.
I remember mid-2000's when the Bills were supposedly about to break out every year and started out hot a lot of years too. They ended up sucking every single year because in the end they simply weren't winners. The Dolphins under Philbin aren't either, or they would have won last year when it actually mattered, and they wouldn't have lost countless games since the first Jets game of 2012 that they were in clear position to win.
