With coordinators, that’s what you want: you want someone who understands the flow of the play, and what the intention of the play is behind its design. Or the mechanics. If you know the intention of the design, or the mechanics, that’ll help with situational football.
It comes down to flow.
If you’ve ever dissected what a surgeon actually does day-to-day, or some lawyers, engineers, etcetera, you can see their jobs are similar to a mechanic’s .If you need a heart valve replacement, a Dr. changes your heart hose much like a mechanic would change one in a car or air plane. An attorney applies fixes to legal problems with a solution from his legal tool box, and so on, an engineer builds to fix problems.
But there are other aspects of being an OC that aren’t technical fixes, these things take more intuition, because what worked one time, might not work the 2nd, due to adjustments or a player playing a better snap on any particular play. When you’re in the game, there are all kinds of factors here, and a lot of time someone with keen intuition knows to just go back to certain things that just usually work often enough that you just go to it, because it’s a high-percentage play, as they say. And you’ve deduced the reasons for why the mechanics of your system should work.
My point of saying all this is because I have no doubt that Moore knows the mechanics or flow of the game from a coordinator’s standpoint. In fact, I think it’s pretty obvious that he’s better, maybe even much better, than McCarthy, as far as knowing the X’s and O’s, and more importantly what those X’s and O’s mean or could probably mean in any situation you could find yourself in with your group.
If anything is going to save McCarthy, it’ll be his intuition. When I look at McCarthy, and I look at Moore, I see Moore being more mechanical, while McCarthy is more intuitive. We saw it when he was proactive about fixing the running game, and going back to a winning formula. Garrett would have simply excused this as part of the process, and done nothing to help make the process better.
Anyway, I will also point out that I’m not saying I’m predicting McCarthy will suck, or that he’ll be great. In fact, I have no clue. But I do think that if he’s going to be effective he’s going to have to really study and cram this off-season to get up to speed to challenge the Eagles, Giants, and Commanders in the NFCE from a mechanical standpoint.
We’ll have a good team next year, but so will the Eagles, Giants, and ***s. I just hope McCarthy does his homework on the mechanics, and brushes up on his time-management game, or this could really backfire on everyone involved.
I guess that’s how it goes at Jerryland. You can hold yourself accountable, but someone else has to get the blame a little more than you, and then you have to pretend to be the right answer to the problem you share with the guy who might not pay you if you don’t do the job well enough to convince him certain enough to hire you next year.
Maybe Jerry and Stephen did promise McCarthy that he’ll coach in Dallas for the next 10 years, but I seriously doubt that. So, at least McCarthy apparently wants to take more of his fate into his own hands. Still, even being the HC, and OC, you’re still only in charge of about 1/3rd of the team in the grand scheme, if we’re talking defense, special teams, and various other aspects to keep a team in business.
On a positive note, I think it will be nice to have Quinn back next year, and likely in the future.
To me, Quinn is just the kind of guy you want because he’s the kind of guy who says something and sticks to his word. And I think ultimately, Jerry and Stephen Jones take note of that, if they haven’t already, and Quinn will live to reap the rewards of his integrity.
In any case, I may have my reservations about how successful McCarthy will be, but I’m rooting for him.
