Aside from our injury and personnel issues last season it felt to me like our coaching staff wasn't up to snuff. And the areas where we had the biggest problem were areas where McVay had gotten creative in moving coaches around. Moving our RB coach to TE and making a weak hire as a replacement at RB led to two positions stagnating. Moving our LB coach to the secondary and relying on the DC primarily to supplement him led to chaos on the back end defensively.
From there we could get into why McVay didn't overcome those shortfalls himself on offense or Morris on defense, and that's a conversation in itself, but it doesn't really matter because the season was mostly over by the time he started to make those types of moves like putting the RB coach back where he should have been.
This offseason was really interesting because it had more examples of McVay going outside his circle in his hires with two guys from the Cheatriots petri dish. Offensively those felt a lot like the Staley hire to me, in that he went out and pulled in specific shit he wanted via those coach hires, to enable him to make changes to scheme and probably other things like preparation, mentality, etc. And in this situation, just like with the Staley hire, there seems to be instant return on that fresh blood.
Pleasant of course is simply an excellent hire and if this young secondary produces over the year like they've started Morris might find him to be a competitor in the HC job market. Because teams know what they're doing in terms of seeing how terrible our secondary was last season so if these guys play tight and together alone he's going to get a lot of cred in NFL circles.
Lastly OC feels like a big upgrade too. Nothing against Liam but this is a results based business and at no point last season did I feel like I was witnessing a unit with a masterful hand behind it. IMO even though the offense is McVay's pride and joy, which is to say the side of the ball where he doesn't fuck around, I think he taps heavily into his OC and if the guy isn't quite up to snuff it comes out on the field.
So for me I think this past offseason will go down as a key window for McVay in terms of reinventing his offense and reestablishing the type of defense he wants his team to play. And going forward I suspect he's going to be more decisive with his staff, more like he is with the players. In other words as a young coach he learned a ton from that losing season and it probably made him better.
