I'm not a big drinker, but to the rest of the AFC East, this article is what I assume $200 whiskey or some expensive wine from a remote corner of France must be like. It is to be savored, appreciated, and rolled about the palate whilst making vague fruit-related comments to your friends at the table. No amount of Patriots tanking can ever engender an ounce of sympathy.
Part of it is 10 years of having guys with Tom Brady avi's on Twitter come after me for everything even remotely critical, including my DeflateGate thoughts. Another is that some of the Patriots media -- not Aaron, but others -- began to act a little like they were the ones who won the Super Bowls.
But most of it is the way they framed their success as a Protestant Work Ethic Bootstraps philosophy. Brady got you on first base with no one out every inning, guys.
Kraft's sweaty campaign to get himself into the HOF has been pretty amusing to watch this year. I can't wait until he follows Arthur Blank's lead and puts himself in the team's Ring of Honor (dying laughing)
It's quite the revisionism to claim Brady carried Belichick from '14 on.
Thanks to Bill's defense and special teams (how in the world did that latter ever crater so suddenly and badly??) Tom pretty much never had to play from far behind. Tom had nothing to do with that. Thanks to Bill's O-line, Brady so seldom faced pressure. Yes, Tom helped there. That O-line also blocked the run well, so Tom so seldom had to be one-dimensional. The threat of both run and pass played off of each other. Bill provided in the 2nd Round that (when healthy) devastating weapon in Gronkowski, who when covered by a linebacker, any linebacker, beat them deep, and when marked by a safety, any safety, ground him into a pulp in the run game.
The '14 Super Bowl win was an offense+defense win, with the defense making the big play at the end. The '16 win, the defense was awful in the first half, then pitched a shutout in the second to enable the comeback. The '17 loss was Tom's shining moment, until the final strip sack he continually brought the offense back drive after drive in the face of the Pats' defensive collapse. The '18 win, Bill's last shining moment. A defensive win, Bill once again defangs a Rams offense that nobody but nobody else had any answers for. Until he showed how.
Bill jumped the shark in '19, taking the horizontal passing game to an insane extreme extent, making Tom look washed up. The next year, under "no risk it, no biscuit" Arians, Tom shows he still has the deep ball. But all the way through '18, man, was Belichick pulling his full weight.
I was being a little glib, of course. But its worth asking how successful the Patriots would have been from 2012 or so on without Brady. Look at the teams in question and their offensive talent.
I’m a QB>coach guy. Johnson, Seifert, Holmgren, McCarthey, Carroll, Payton etc., all won Super Bowls with HOF-level quarterbacks, but were pretty unremarkable without one.
And I believe that the best head coach in the world (Andy Reid?) may never win a championship without a great quarterback, but the best quarterbacks can (and often do) win championships with average head coaches.
And I dislike Belichick and the Patriots. A lot.
And the coaching job that Belichick did in 2018 was spectacular. He may be a miserable human being, but sometimes he really did make it look like a chess/checkers thing.
I think what you are looking at is QB-coach-organization harmony in many cases.
With Reid, you can see a whole decade in Philly with good-to-great-but-not-historic QB play in McNabb. And you see a team that gets to the NFC title game every year, reaches the playoffs with his backups, etc. And then you have five years of the playoffs with Alex Smith. He probably never wins a Super Bowl without Mahomes, but there is something to be said for being able to coach for 20 years until you get your shot at a Mahomes, and having some HoFers and Pro Bowls around for him to work with when he arrives.
Mike did an article like this on the old Football Outsiders site in 2020 on the Lions right after they fired Matt Patricia. Imagine how depressing it was for Lions fans, who had no recent dynasty to look back on!
The Patriots have had the S-L-O-W-E-S-T offense in the league since 2022. It was even slow during Mac's good year, but it was super physical. I think everyone but the Patriots themselves realize this.
I think you're right, Mike, that the Commanders offer the best rebuilding model for the Patriots because as you pointed out, New England's single greatest resource is cap space. The free agency class for offensive linemen looks promising right now, and NE should be able to shore up the line if they recruit and sign the right players. Garrett Bolles, Ben Bredeson, Liam Eichenberg, Trey Smith, Mike Onwenu and a couple of promising draft picks would make a pretty decent line with depth for now and into the future.
The Texans and Bears also look to have succeeded in their rebuilding processes, but I'm not sure I'd use either of those teams as models.
Regardless, the one thing they all have in common is that they stunk for several years and then lucked into a critical mass of blue chip prospects, most importantly at QB, that allowed them to achieve exit velocity. If Maye pans out, then the Patriots will have accomplished the most difficult and crucial goal of the rebuild, and the timeline might shrink to just one or two seasons. If not, then Pats fans are probably looking at 2027 as the earliest likely winning season.
Commanders have fixed one side of their football team, largely because Daniels has panned out as the 1A/1B he was projected to be. They still have a ton of work to do on the other side of the ball, so they offer hope, but not a true path, not just yet.
The Texans are somewhat more promising, but their O-line isn't much better than NE and, just like WAS, they're basically where they are because Stroud has panned out as the 1A/1B he was projected to be. If they were playing in the AFC North instead of the AFC South, I'm not sure they'd be viewed as highly as they generally are.
The Bears are where they are because they fleeced the Panthers. That'd be the best possible route to success for the Pats to follow, but I'm not sure they can pull off that kind of lopsided trade deal. They're also still no better than the 3rd, maybe 4th best team in their division.
The Pats mostly need to stop making dumb front office moves. They don't need to outsmart the rest of the league, they just need to not outsmart themselves. Pay going rates for decent veterans in positions of need (especially OL) but don't set the market, draft the best rated prospects when its their turn on the clock (instead of reaching 2 rounds because they know better), and then hope that Maye develops. That's enough to become a two year turnaround into a playoff team.
Agreed, but the Chiefs will have a hard time re-signing Trey Smith, given where the guard market is going (with no small assist from the Chiefs signing Joe Thuney in 2020 to a then record deal). The Pats can and should make a play for him. He's a monster. Other teams might also pass on re-signing mid-tier guys. Pats fans can reasonably hope for at least one or two FA signings on the OL.
NE needs so many guys in so many positions, including most of the OL, that I feel like they'd be better served at this point to land 2 or 3 mid-level OL veterans rather than splashing on a stud. They can get their studs through the drafts or make a splash in a few years once the rest of their roster has better depth.
I dislike Robert Kraft because he lied and lied and lied all throughout DeflateGate in order to help the Pats make yet a few more $$$, and since letting Belichick go Kraft's been bad-mouthing him to his fellow owners so as to avoid Bill's getting a chance to make Kraft look bad.
I don't dislike Kraft all that much 'cuz lying when it's really really in my own interest to do so is Human Behavior 101, 'cuz billionaires become billionaires by continuing to chase every last nickel even after they became mulitmultimulti millionaires so how much should you hold their essential nature against them, 'cuz C'ing Y own A is again near universal human behavior, and 'cuz hiring Belichick on anything near his own terms probably is a very bad idea.
Are you having a mail bag anytime soon? I need to know what the eff is going on with the Ravens D.
Is it just a new DC's first year and they will gel eventually? (How many times do you hear people say, "It's gonna take some time for QB X to fully understand the new system of OC Y", but I rarely hear the same about first year DCs.) Are they absolutely crushing it on offense so much that they play ultra prevent defense? I've heard the pass rush sucks, and its making the secondary look bad, but they're 4th in total sacks?
On paper they look so talented, so it's breaking my brain. A regression from last year was expected, but this is embarrassing.
As a neutral, I remember thinking the Lions-Rams game early in the season was a pretty darn good game. Both teams playing hard, making plays, hard hits, the Rams making a comeback, then in OT Lions methodically doing what Mike said and deciding they’ve had enough of this and running the ball straight up the middle till they got in the end zone.
I dont agree what the Patriots were doing would have failed without Brady "over a decade ago". They still won with number one defenses of 2016, 2018, and 2014 was a slow start and elite D finish. Sure they wouldnt win Superbowls without a great QB but a decent one would have still kept them in the final 4 those even years and wildcard exits 2013,15,17. They still developed elite defenses good enough to make mac jones look decent. Then it collapsed with free agency splurge on offense; they no longer could develop players on that side.
Bellichik lost it late as staff left leaving him without successors carefully groomed that grew up as interns. Why tweedledee and tweedledum were offensive coordinators.
Look I hated them, but I wouldn't have hated a team carried by a QB; thats a team that wont win SBs. Defense usually wins SBs, Even Brady couldn't overcome avg defense seasons. He came close in 2017.
Mahomes broke the curse in 2022. But he wont be carrying any avg defenses until they give him what he had 2018-2022.
There are a lot of Patriot's fans I hear on podcasts (of course, everyone here likely knows about the loudest over at The Ringer) and from a non-Patriot's fan perspective, I can't imagine a better written summary of this team. All of the Patriot's fans who are on their own internal text threads and reading nothing but local stuff should read this two or three times and then re-start all of their conversations with this as the starting point.
(Easier said than done, of course - I'm sure if you wrote something like this on the Seahawks I'd be screaming how you know nothing!!!).
I hope it works out for them -- I'm so sick of hearing the phrase "Brady & Belichick" for the past 20 years, "Mayo & Maye" would be a nice inoffensive replacement.
The Patriots seemed to have produced two really good coaches: Brian Flores and Larry Izzo (and the latter never coached for the Patriots, starting his coaching career with the Coughlin Giants). Flores is the maestro behind the hottest defense this year, Izzo turned around Special Teams wherever he has been (doing that for the Commanders this year). I think both have future as head coaches (Flores was not great with the Dolphins, but he was set up for failure).
And yeah, the Patriots are in a really good position next year. They can easily commit $60M to a superb offensive line, and will have a lot of draft capital (if they spend it wisely). Add to that some budget solid veterans and there's still budget for getting a star.
Dave Canales may be one and done with the Panthers, and could be a really good candidate for OC (especially given his track record with QBs, from early career Russell Wilson, to Geno and Mayfield renaissances, maybe we can even add USFL MVP Alex McGough to his list of accomplishments).
Raven is right! Part of it was that they splurged on Agholor, Jalen Mills and Jonnu Smith, plus Hunter Henry and Bourne. Henry is good. Bourne is a fine role player who got paid like a WR2. The other 3 were examples of bad pro scouting and cap mgmt/
They got Judon, which was money well spent. They also overpaid for every TE available.
So here's the question: was the poorly executed spending spree and wasteful draft days that happened on either side of it Belichick (as many believed) or a reflection that the Pats' scouting department is incompetent (which the sole post-Belichick draft would suggest)? Tanier's article argues the latter and I'm inclined to agree, but without being privy to the discussions on how Cole Strange became a 1st round draft pick, for example, its impossible to know.
I don't think Flores was setup for failure, except in that first "tank" year. It is well documented that he antagonized and sabotgaged his young rookie QB (Tua), who he didn't want to draft in the first place. He struggled to hire and maintain a coaching staff and turned over multiple OCs - I believe he had a new OC every year he was HC of the Dolphins. LIke many failed Belicheat acolytes (e.g. Patricia, McDaniels) he seemed bring all the the bad elements of the "Patriot Way" without having TB12 as his QB. Flores is obviously an excellent DC and I wish him well in landing a HC gig. However, history has shown that excellent and successful OCs and DCs do not always translate into good HCs.
Agreed OC/DCs don't always make good HCs, but I'm not sure Flores turning over OCs is a strike against him. Being willing to go away from what's not working is a positive trait in this context. Also, Tua may well have been over-drafted, so maybe Flores was right on that front (if, possibly, not in the subsequent treatment, I don't know enough about that to comment).
Flores juggled his OCs and sparred with Tua, as you said, Fins. He obviously rattled Tua. If I am considering Flores as a head coach, it's for some team that has a 30-year old QB but is rebuilding everywhere else. Cowboys, maybe? And I insist he hire an OC who is his own soverign nation.
Wait. There's more. In that 1st season Flores antagonized and mismanaged Minkah, resulting in the future HOFer demanding a trade. Flores also passively-aggressively undermined respected veteran WR Kenny Stills on the latter's anthem-kneel-down stance and traded him away with Laremy Tunsil before the start of the 2019 season. Jim Caldwell joined Flores' staff in Feb/19 and quit in July/19. Hmmm. That said, I bear no ill will towards Flores and I genuinely believe he's earned a 2nd chance to be a HC. After all, this is a league that gave multiple HC chances to Adam Gase (3) and Josh McDaniels (2)!
I'm not a big drinker, but to the rest of the AFC East, this article is what I assume $200 whiskey or some expensive wine from a remote corner of France must be like. It is to be savored, appreciated, and rolled about the palate whilst making vague fruit-related comments to your friends at the table. No amount of Patriots tanking can ever engender an ounce of sympathy.
I can guarantee that feeling extends beyond the AFC East.
Schadenfreude ist die allerbeste Freude.
Yes. 100%!
Yeah. I enjoy watching the Patriots flounder too.
Part of it is 10 years of having guys with Tom Brady avi's on Twitter come after me for everything even remotely critical, including my DeflateGate thoughts. Another is that some of the Patriots media -- not Aaron, but others -- began to act a little like they were the ones who won the Super Bowls.
But most of it is the way they framed their success as a Protestant Work Ethic Bootstraps philosophy. Brady got you on first base with no one out every inning, guys.
I just realized that is a septic tank.
The grass is always greener over the septic tank!
I thought it was a giant Lego.
I thought it was a bunker, similar to the one Saddam Hussein was hiding in.
I live in the suburbs on the grid. I do not know what a septic tank looks like. Wikimedia Commons says it looks like that!
Steve Belichick already left the team and apparently has turned the Huskies from the #56 defense in college football to #8.
Thanks. I am gonna scrub that.
Kraft's sweaty campaign to get himself into the HOF has been pretty amusing to watch this year. I can't wait until he follows Arthur Blank's lead and puts himself in the team's Ring of Honor (dying laughing)
He just needs to wait until the happy ending gets memory holed. Insiders love him, so he will get in.
It's quite the revisionism to claim Brady carried Belichick from '14 on.
Thanks to Bill's defense and special teams (how in the world did that latter ever crater so suddenly and badly??) Tom pretty much never had to play from far behind. Tom had nothing to do with that. Thanks to Bill's O-line, Brady so seldom faced pressure. Yes, Tom helped there. That O-line also blocked the run well, so Tom so seldom had to be one-dimensional. The threat of both run and pass played off of each other. Bill provided in the 2nd Round that (when healthy) devastating weapon in Gronkowski, who when covered by a linebacker, any linebacker, beat them deep, and when marked by a safety, any safety, ground him into a pulp in the run game.
The '14 Super Bowl win was an offense+defense win, with the defense making the big play at the end. The '16 win, the defense was awful in the first half, then pitched a shutout in the second to enable the comeback. The '17 loss was Tom's shining moment, until the final strip sack he continually brought the offense back drive after drive in the face of the Pats' defensive collapse. The '18 win, Bill's last shining moment. A defensive win, Bill once again defangs a Rams offense that nobody but nobody else had any answers for. Until he showed how.
Bill jumped the shark in '19, taking the horizontal passing game to an insane extreme extent, making Tom look washed up. The next year, under "no risk it, no biscuit" Arians, Tom shows he still has the deep ball. But all the way through '18, man, was Belichick pulling his full weight.
I was being a little glib, of course. But its worth asking how successful the Patriots would have been from 2012 or so on without Brady. Look at the teams in question and their offensive talent.
I’m a QB>coach guy. Johnson, Seifert, Holmgren, McCarthey, Carroll, Payton etc., all won Super Bowls with HOF-level quarterbacks, but were pretty unremarkable without one.
And I believe that the best head coach in the world (Andy Reid?) may never win a championship without a great quarterback, but the best quarterbacks can (and often do) win championships with average head coaches.
And I dislike Belichick and the Patriots. A lot.
And the coaching job that Belichick did in 2018 was spectacular. He may be a miserable human being, but sometimes he really did make it look like a chess/checkers thing.
I think what you are looking at is QB-coach-organization harmony in many cases.
With Reid, you can see a whole decade in Philly with good-to-great-but-not-historic QB play in McNabb. And you see a team that gets to the NFC title game every year, reaches the playoffs with his backups, etc. And then you have five years of the playoffs with Alex Smith. He probably never wins a Super Bowl without Mahomes, but there is something to be said for being able to coach for 20 years until you get your shot at a Mahomes, and having some HoFers and Pro Bowls around for him to work with when he arrives.
Oof. If we didn’t experience a 20 year dynasty, this situation would be really depressing
Mike did an article like this on the old Football Outsiders site in 2020 on the Lions right after they fired Matt Patricia. Imagine how depressing it was for Lions fans, who had no recent dynasty to look back on!
I saw a bit of the Patriots v Jets game earlier this season. What jumped out to me was how much faster the Jets defense was than the Patriots offense.
The Patriots have had the S-L-O-W-E-S-T offense in the league since 2022. It was even slow during Mac's good year, but it was super physical. I think everyone but the Patriots themselves realize this.
I think you're right, Mike, that the Commanders offer the best rebuilding model for the Patriots because as you pointed out, New England's single greatest resource is cap space. The free agency class for offensive linemen looks promising right now, and NE should be able to shore up the line if they recruit and sign the right players. Garrett Bolles, Ben Bredeson, Liam Eichenberg, Trey Smith, Mike Onwenu and a couple of promising draft picks would make a pretty decent line with depth for now and into the future.
The Texans and Bears also look to have succeeded in their rebuilding processes, but I'm not sure I'd use either of those teams as models.
Regardless, the one thing they all have in common is that they stunk for several years and then lucked into a critical mass of blue chip prospects, most importantly at QB, that allowed them to achieve exit velocity. If Maye pans out, then the Patriots will have accomplished the most difficult and crucial goal of the rebuild, and the timeline might shrink to just one or two seasons. If not, then Pats fans are probably looking at 2027 as the earliest likely winning season.
Agree with this.
Commanders have fixed one side of their football team, largely because Daniels has panned out as the 1A/1B he was projected to be. They still have a ton of work to do on the other side of the ball, so they offer hope, but not a true path, not just yet.
The Texans are somewhat more promising, but their O-line isn't much better than NE and, just like WAS, they're basically where they are because Stroud has panned out as the 1A/1B he was projected to be. If they were playing in the AFC North instead of the AFC South, I'm not sure they'd be viewed as highly as they generally are.
The Bears are where they are because they fleeced the Panthers. That'd be the best possible route to success for the Pats to follow, but I'm not sure they can pull off that kind of lopsided trade deal. They're also still no better than the 3rd, maybe 4th best team in their division.
The Pats mostly need to stop making dumb front office moves. They don't need to outsmart the rest of the league, they just need to not outsmart themselves. Pay going rates for decent veterans in positions of need (especially OL) but don't set the market, draft the best rated prospects when its their turn on the clock (instead of reaching 2 rounds because they know better), and then hope that Maye develops. That's enough to become a two year turnaround into a playoff team.
The linemen free agency class always looks one helluva lot better in October than it winds up being come the next year.
The trick may be mid-tier guys at mid-tier prices.
Agreed, but the Chiefs will have a hard time re-signing Trey Smith, given where the guard market is going (with no small assist from the Chiefs signing Joe Thuney in 2020 to a then record deal). The Pats can and should make a play for him. He's a monster. Other teams might also pass on re-signing mid-tier guys. Pats fans can reasonably hope for at least one or two FA signings on the OL.
NE needs so many guys in so many positions, including most of the OL, that I feel like they'd be better served at this point to land 2 or 3 mid-level OL veterans rather than splashing on a stud. They can get their studs through the drafts or make a splash in a few years once the rest of their roster has better depth.
I dislike Robert Kraft because he lied and lied and lied all throughout DeflateGate in order to help the Pats make yet a few more $$$, and since letting Belichick go Kraft's been bad-mouthing him to his fellow owners so as to avoid Bill's getting a chance to make Kraft look bad.
I don't dislike Kraft all that much 'cuz lying when it's really really in my own interest to do so is Human Behavior 101, 'cuz billionaires become billionaires by continuing to chase every last nickel even after they became mulitmultimulti millionaires so how much should you hold their essential nature against them, 'cuz C'ing Y own A is again near universal human behavior, and 'cuz hiring Belichick on anything near his own terms probably is a very bad idea.
Are you having a mail bag anytime soon? I need to know what the eff is going on with the Ravens D.
Is it just a new DC's first year and they will gel eventually? (How many times do you hear people say, "It's gonna take some time for QB X to fully understand the new system of OC Y", but I rarely hear the same about first year DCs.) Are they absolutely crushing it on offense so much that they play ultra prevent defense? I've heard the pass rush sucks, and its making the secondary look bad, but they're 4th in total sacks?
On paper they look so talented, so it's breaking my brain. A regression from last year was expected, but this is embarrassing.
Next week!
As a neutral, I remember thinking the Lions-Rams game early in the season was a pretty darn good game. Both teams playing hard, making plays, hard hits, the Rams making a comeback, then in OT Lions methodically doing what Mike said and deciding they’ve had enough of this and running the ball straight up the middle till they got in the end zone.
I dont agree what the Patriots were doing would have failed without Brady "over a decade ago". They still won with number one defenses of 2016, 2018, and 2014 was a slow start and elite D finish. Sure they wouldnt win Superbowls without a great QB but a decent one would have still kept them in the final 4 those even years and wildcard exits 2013,15,17. They still developed elite defenses good enough to make mac jones look decent. Then it collapsed with free agency splurge on offense; they no longer could develop players on that side.
Bellichik lost it late as staff left leaving him without successors carefully groomed that grew up as interns. Why tweedledee and tweedledum were offensive coordinators.
Look I hated them, but I wouldn't have hated a team carried by a QB; thats a team that wont win SBs. Defense usually wins SBs, Even Brady couldn't overcome avg defense seasons. He came close in 2017.
Mahomes broke the curse in 2022. But he wont be carrying any avg defenses until they give him what he had 2018-2022.
There are a lot of Patriot's fans I hear on podcasts (of course, everyone here likely knows about the loudest over at The Ringer) and from a non-Patriot's fan perspective, I can't imagine a better written summary of this team. All of the Patriot's fans who are on their own internal text threads and reading nothing but local stuff should read this two or three times and then re-start all of their conversations with this as the starting point.
(Easier said than done, of course - I'm sure if you wrote something like this on the Seahawks I'd be screaming how you know nothing!!!).
I hope it works out for them -- I'm so sick of hearing the phrase "Brady & Belichick" for the past 20 years, "Mayo & Maye" would be a nice inoffensive replacement.
Wish Maye had a “s” as the last letter in his last name so him and his coach could be called “Mayo-Mayes”.
HA! Mayommaise.
The Patriots seemed to have produced two really good coaches: Brian Flores and Larry Izzo (and the latter never coached for the Patriots, starting his coaching career with the Coughlin Giants). Flores is the maestro behind the hottest defense this year, Izzo turned around Special Teams wherever he has been (doing that for the Commanders this year). I think both have future as head coaches (Flores was not great with the Dolphins, but he was set up for failure).
And yeah, the Patriots are in a really good position next year. They can easily commit $60M to a superb offensive line, and will have a lot of draft capital (if they spend it wisely). Add to that some budget solid veterans and there's still budget for getting a star.
Dave Canales may be one and done with the Panthers, and could be a really good candidate for OC (especially given his track record with QBs, from early career Russell Wilson, to Geno and Mayfield renaissances, maybe we can even add USFL MVP Alex McGough to his list of accomplishments).
I believe a few years ago the Pats had a ton of cap space and went on a spending spree. And here we are.
Bravo observation. Bravo bravo bravo! Wish I could 'like' it more times.
Raven is right! Part of it was that they splurged on Agholor, Jalen Mills and Jonnu Smith, plus Hunter Henry and Bourne. Henry is good. Bourne is a fine role player who got paid like a WR2. The other 3 were examples of bad pro scouting and cap mgmt/
They got Judon, which was money well spent. They also overpaid for every TE available.
So here's the question: was the poorly executed spending spree and wasteful draft days that happened on either side of it Belichick (as many believed) or a reflection that the Pats' scouting department is incompetent (which the sole post-Belichick draft would suggest)? Tanier's article argues the latter and I'm inclined to agree, but without being privy to the discussions on how Cole Strange became a 1st round draft pick, for example, its impossible to know.
Hey, that 2021 playoff appearance that those free agents got them was nice, right?? (Please ignore what happened when the playoffs started).
I don't think Flores was setup for failure, except in that first "tank" year. It is well documented that he antagonized and sabotgaged his young rookie QB (Tua), who he didn't want to draft in the first place. He struggled to hire and maintain a coaching staff and turned over multiple OCs - I believe he had a new OC every year he was HC of the Dolphins. LIke many failed Belicheat acolytes (e.g. Patricia, McDaniels) he seemed bring all the the bad elements of the "Patriot Way" without having TB12 as his QB. Flores is obviously an excellent DC and I wish him well in landing a HC gig. However, history has shown that excellent and successful OCs and DCs do not always translate into good HCs.
Agreed OC/DCs don't always make good HCs, but I'm not sure Flores turning over OCs is a strike against him. Being willing to go away from what's not working is a positive trait in this context. Also, Tua may well have been over-drafted, so maybe Flores was right on that front (if, possibly, not in the subsequent treatment, I don't know enough about that to comment).
It's pretty well documented that Flores couldn't hire &/or keep OCs. BTW, born in the Hammer so a big Oskee Wee Wee to you.
Flores juggled his OCs and sparred with Tua, as you said, Fins. He obviously rattled Tua. If I am considering Flores as a head coach, it's for some team that has a 30-year old QB but is rebuilding everywhere else. Cowboys, maybe? And I insist he hire an OC who is his own soverign nation.
Wait. There's more. In that 1st season Flores antagonized and mismanaged Minkah, resulting in the future HOFer demanding a trade. Flores also passively-aggressively undermined respected veteran WR Kenny Stills on the latter's anthem-kneel-down stance and traded him away with Laremy Tunsil before the start of the 2019 season. Jim Caldwell joined Flores' staff in Feb/19 and quit in July/19. Hmmm. That said, I bear no ill will towards Flores and I genuinely believe he's earned a 2nd chance to be a HC. After all, this is a league that gave multiple HC chances to Adam Gase (3) and Josh McDaniels (2)!