Spagnola: This Guy (Leary) On The Cowboys Offensive Line Radar

[burmafrd]

Might be BS to you but I think it's BS to call it an excuse.

I call BS on your BS

 

[Eskimo]

It sure didn't seem to hurt the 49'ers too much when that team was changing both coaching staff and schemes.

They somehow managed to go to the NFC Championship Game.

The reason why it may have hurt us more than most on defense is that Rob Ryan ran an abnormally complicated scheme where every player had to have a good understanding of what every other player was doing in every situation to make the adjustments needed for the scheme to work. It's all above my head. I think that is part of the reason that we changed DCs - it was decided that it took players too long to adjust to the scheme and it was tough to bring in injury replacements during the year and have them pick up the scheme.

As for the offensive side of the ball, the reason why we were hurt more than most is all the flux in the OL. Free and Kosier were the returning players and Kosier was flipping sides. Then we tried to go into the season with a rookie 7th round OG who didn't start in college (Nagy), a UDFA Center in his 2nd year (Costa) who had started 1 or 2 games at OG the year before as an injury replacement and a 20 year old rookie. That is a lot of youth, inexperience and lack of continuity. However, most importantly it was a general lack of ability and talent. There is no comparison between what Garrett inherited and what Harbaugh inherited. Harbaugh got 3 first rounders and maybe the 2nd or 3rd best LT on the OL and a defense full of young Pro Bowl talent. The reason the 49ers struggled before is they had a lot of young players learning the game, bad coaching under Singletary who doesn't belong as a HC and poor QB play. The place where Harbaugh really helped was getting Alex Smith to play better which isn't a small feat but I think people really overestimate how much of the 49ers turnaround was due to him and how much was from the GM stacking that team with young ascending talent.

It just seems like it is this year that the media has finally clued into the fact that our roster talent has been severely over-estimated. There is very little comparison between the talent level of the 49ers roster and ours, IMO. What we had was old declining talent when Garrett took over - Bigg Davis, Gurode, Colombo, RW11, Barber, Ratliff, Bradie James, Keith Brooking, Terence Newman. All of those guys were much better players in 2006-7 but were shells of their former selves by the time Garrett took over. It has been a lot of work to bring in youth to the roster while lacking extra picks, tradeable commodities or salary cap space.

I think Dallas' head coach will always struggle to get the team in playoffs so long as Jones is in charge and maxing out the cap with these backloaded contracts that create tons of dead money every year and overpay the talent. In a league with a hard cap and other owners willing to max out their cap Jones' deep pockets are actually a disadvantage.


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