But that's a big "if". Shanahan has done nothing in his SB appearances but shit the bed (1x as an OC and 1x as a HC).

Hard to kill him over yesterday but I bet he'd love to have thrown the challenge flag on the Smith play and since he is so involved with the offensive game plan, you would think he had to be aware that they had a play early on in the game where the design was to let their 2nd string TE block one of the season's best outside pass rushers 1 v 1, which led directly to Purdy being knocked out. Also, why the **** is he having CMC (an at worst top 5 non QB in the league) throwing passes down 20 something with 4 minutes left in the game? Can you imagine if McCaffrey suffered a bad injury that messed with his '23 season on that play? Just dumb.

They weren't wrong about our willingness to use our rookie corners to play press coverage. The Bills fairly consistently played off and let the Cinci WRs do whatever they wanted.

What if…Andy rides off into the sunset after beating the Eaglebirds. Who is his successor?

They kind of had to, right? Quite a bit harder to play press man in heavy snow.

Kafka

Patrick Manning

Don't put that evil on us.

Imagine Sean Payton lmfao.

No doubt that punt was the right call. With how much the offense struggling there was no guarantee they would have converted it. Had they failed, Cincinnati would have been in a good position for a game winning FG. By punting they at least forced the Bengals to have to drive the length of the field to win. Imagine had he gone for it, we don’t convert and the Bengals took the rest of the game to kick a game winning FG. People would have blown their tops because he chose to go for it.

I think most would have forgiven him, because, Mahomes.

At the end of the game in Cincy, Andy did not put his faith in Patrick.

And people here CRUCIFIED him for it. Myself included.

Andy didn't let his past dictate his present, he played the scenario given to him, perfectly.

And doubled down on Skyy.

the only way to blow double digit leads is to get them often. and andy reid gets them ALL THE TIME.

2013 - led by 28 vs colts
2015 - led by 30 vs texans
2017 - led by 18 vs titans
2018 - led by 17 vs colts
2019 - led by 20 vs texans; led by 18 vs titans; led by 11 vs 49ers
2020 - led by 16 vs browns; led by 23 vs bills
2021 - led by 28 vs steelers; led by 18 vs bengals
2022 - led by 10 vs jaguars; led by 10 vs bengals

so while many franchises haven't even been able to win a playoff game over the last decade, andy has not only won a shit load of games, he's taken double digit leads in THIRTEEN OF THEM!

and yes, he's blown some of them. so what.

five afc title game hosts, three super bowl appearances. sit back and enjoy the ride.

Yeah, according to those posters in that thread, Frazier does not play man much at all. Spags was kind of coaxed into playing a lot of press man because of the plain fact that he had a handful of young/inexperienced DBs, and what they did best by a wide margin was play man. At the beginning of the year, our young secondary was getting torched whenever they played zone, so it made a lot of sense to gameplan a lot of man coverage.

But one of the many things really like about Spags is that he didn't simply throw up his hands and give up on playing zone, just because the early results showed that the secondary was really porous when playing zone. He kept coaching up his unit, kept calling zones, and gave his guys tons of opportunities to fail/succeed and learn from their mistakes over the course of the season.

And now they're able to play zone coverages much better than before, which opened up the playbook for Spags, allowed him call a much more unpredictable game and kept QBs/OCs from getting too comfortable.

And now this is a secondary whose weaknesses have shrunk considerably and are now a strength of the defense and definitely not a weakness.

And all of that started with Spags believing in and coaching up his players regardless of how they struggled initially, even when a lot of the sports reporting media and fanbase didn't.

Honestly, it's probably why his defenses continue to improve during the season every year. He's always playing the long game to get the most out of the talent he has in any given year.

Agreed. You know, now that I think about it, it's almost like Spagnuolo has done this DC thing before with some degree of success, doesn't it?:)

Andy is a teacher first and foremost. I'm guessing Spags and Merritt are largely the same.