Yeah, uh, if anything, THIS paragraph is what doesn't agree with Sturm. He even says Garrett was a "bright offensive mind," or something along those lines. I wouldn't get carried away with giving him too much credit, but this is where the undersell gets push back from me.
What, he gets no credit for helping guys like Romo, Austin, Barber, Dez, Murray, guys who he started coaching very early in their careers?
This is where we go off the rails. "It was ALL the talent. Garrett did nothing. He held them back."
No, of course, their high flying numbers had nothing to do with his coaching -- either his development from teaching skills at practice or his game-plans and playcalls for Sunday.
Come on. This is where it gets ridiculous. You have people trying to sell that he had nothing to do with a fourth round QB coming in here and putting together a Pro Bowl season and career to date. Trying to sell that he had nothing to do with relatively high-ranking offenses over the years.
He absolutely had a hand in all this.
And we can agree that he deserved to be fired without going crazy trying to deny any positive he had here. You can maintain that he should have been fired in 2012 and say that the negatives outweighed the positives every year, but still acknowledge there were some positives.
That's where this debate becomes a problem so consistently from my perspective.
It wouldn't surprise me to see Jones perform over his head in this year or coming years. Yeah I do suspect they will ride Barkley but the OL is being reinforced and perhaps some of the simplicity which doomed Garrett from advancing may help Jones develop a bit.
Of course he's not gonna have a McVay type influence, McVay had a great coaching performance for a couple years there, he was a very hot coaching prospect and everyone agrees Garrett is not that. It's just that we also can't sit here and deny credit for what positives do occur, even if they aren't enough.
Do you want to know why almost nobody actually engages you seriously on this topic?
Because you try to squeeze out every last drop of credit and talk around mostly every shortcoming of a HC who handicapped this team for nearly a decade, who was nearly fired 2 or 3 times by the only organization who wouldn't have fired him several times over, only to talk them into firing the DC or clearing out the offensive assistants or agreeing to give up play-calling duties, and who ultimately wasted several prime seasons of contending-level talent.
A HC who is the definition of replacement level, average at best in almost every single way, and a guy who almost unanimously should've been fired years earlier, yet you want to parse out how much credit he deserves for 2014 or 2016, and talk around maybe why it was fine that he was kept around for a decade with nothing to show for it.
He was brought in for his supposed offensive pedigree, and he did a nice job shifting from the Parcells conservative mindset to an aggressive passing attack from 07-09. The offenses in 2007 and 2009 were very good, but that was almost exclusively with talent that was fully formed when he got here in 2007. Guys like Romo, Owens, Barber, Witten, Flozell, Gurode, Austin, etc. had been with the team for years, or in Owens case the NFL for years.
Then when the talent started to hollow out from 2011-13 everything went to shit, the offense was inconsistent at best, often starting slow, getting down, and then relying on Romo to go no-huddle to drag them back into games with unscripted "back yard ball". Even in 2013 when we had the makings of our dominant 2014 offense Garrett's dumbass refused to adjust the way he called plays or designed the offense, and was more or less forced into ceding play-calling to Linehan, but more importantly leaning more heavily on the run game/OL.
Think about that, the organization that loved him so, Jerry Jones who looked at him like a son, forced him to give up play-calling and then in 2014 we had an absolutely dominant offense with more or less the same roster we had in 2013.
To be fair I don't give Linehan or Garrett much credit for 2014 or 2016 either way, I think it was mostly the product of an all-time type OL and getting peak performances from fresh, motivated RB's, combined with an otherwise very talented depth chart, but the fact remains that we had more or less the same offense in 2013 as in 2014 and it took removing Garrett as play-caller to get to the level they reached.
And do you know why people tend to downplay the successes and amplify the failures?
Because anytime the talent wasn't at completely optimal levels, the offense (and the team) either floundered or was average. 2017, even with Elliott, 2018 before the Cooper trade, and even then the offense was nowhere near elite even with Dak/Elliott/Tyron/Martin/Cooper, in 2019 we had probably the best offensive roster outside of Kansas City and the offense was average to bad against good opponents.
Whatever our talent level was, that's what we were, he almost never did anything to elevate the team to heights beyond what their baseline talent was, and often times he was a hindrance (late game management, being removed as play-caller, allowing the team to come out flat against GB in 2016 even though he was now a "walkaround coach"). The fact that you feel the need to protect a coach like that and argue continuously just to try to convince people that he was average, maybe, is pretty ridiculous.
