and coincides with a knawing I’ve had in my gut about Greg Knapp. It strikes me that Mora brought in Knapp to transform Seattle into a top 10 rushing team. Why? The result should not be a shock in retrospect, as we didn’t have the players to accomplish that, sacrificed the passing game to an extent in the attempt, and Knapps offense required everyone to learn the new “language”. Both Hass and Burly have commented that it was like being a rookie all over again. WTF? How could anyone have thought that was a good plan? Fire Mora now, not because he’s a bad guy, just not a good football coach. Send his entire staff packing with him. Clean slate for the new GM.

Coaching can’t make up for talent. But it can make the most of it. Or mis-use it to waste.

I don’t know if that’s what’s up with Seattle. To a degree, it is. It sure seemed like a great move, to switch Mebane to 3-tech. The “West Coast Defense” stuff made it seem like these coaches really knew what they were doing, and were integrating the best of multiple worlds into a seamless scheme. I wonder, now, if the Bradley-Mora-Quinn mix didn’t just foolishly jumble the best pieces of multiple worlds into a scheme that either contradicted itself or was vulnerable to certain things by leaving out the safeguards and balances that the other schemes those pieces came from were built upon.

But scheme didn’t do us in. I also suspect it made things worse, but it didn’t do us in. Execution did, above all, and it seems far-fetched to suggest that all of the players we think are talented and play well actually are/do. Yeah, Hasselbeck is the biggest problem. Kerney is done, Cole is a liability, Grant lacked effort, concentration and assignment fidelity. But they alone weren’t the problem.

The coaching’s worst problem was the reaction to the results. Coaching wasn’t integral in us losing, but it was integral in the deterioration of the harmony of this team.

So yes, coaching matters. More than in any other sport, coaching matters in football.

but the Jets are a mess. That defense is getting old and Sanchez looks like he’s two to three years from competence—should he ever reach it. I think that’s a team that will hover around mediocre before a forced rebuild, and mediocre was possible because the Jets were so bad for so long. That O-line is nuts.

The Jets absolutely should not be the model for how Seattle rebuilds. We want talent peaking together. Not one unit peaking as another grows; that same unit fading as the latter peaks.

And finally, this doesn’t really prove the impact of coaching. Teams can become better and worse under the same head coach. Ryan is a fun personality and so he gets credited, but that defense may have performed similarly under any defensive coordinator.