I don't care about 'great coach.' I mean, I do, but that's a subjective word. The only thing I've ever cared about with Garrett is whether or not he's a good enough coach to assemble, develop, and then get a team to a Superbowl championship.
I do think he's built an NFC contender and that it's pretty hard to argue otherwise. 12 and 13 win seasons, with the personnel we've got right now speaks for itself as far as I'm concerned. The NFL has a single elimination playoff format, and as long as it does, you have a lot of good teams going home unhappy every year and only one going home happy. But the fact that we're discussing whether or not he's a 'great' coach already means that most people recognize that he's at least a pretty good coach.
That fact alone is huge, huge progress from where we were during the 8-8 season when I was debating with every idiot I could find (and if you're one of those idiots, I'm obviously not talking about *you* here, guys. It was somebody else) that getting an 8-8 team to 8-8 is not actually a disaster and that sometimes the best coaching jobs happen on teams that don't have competitive personnel.
Now, we've got the personnel to compete. We competed in 2014, and we competed in 2016. We look like a team that's capable of competing this season, too. We'll see what happens. When we play defense as well as we play offense, I have a feeling the debate over the quality of our HC won't be all that interesting. If we don't get there, that question will have answered itself the other way and I won't disagree.
