Bolts Coach – No BS
Disappointed? Everyone is, another non-playoff season, as Philip Rivers career ticks away.
And for only the second time in a decade, the health of the Chargers quarterback becomes an off-season question, with possible surgery coming on an ailing back, for a bulging disc, or a herniated disc. He has not had a major injury since the knee surgery scope prior to the playoffs some 7-years ago.
If that happens, it would be the exclamation point to just an awful season in San Diego, a season ravaged by injuries.
No one wants to hear about injuries, calling them excuses. I call them explanations. But tell me, when you looked at the Chargers depth chart on opening day, if I had told you they would lose two veteran offensive lineman, their top three running backs, and go thru five centers, lose a number of defensive players for a chunk of the season, do you think we would have been talking about a 9-win season?
This is what Mike McCoy had to deal with right from the get-go, and it got worse.
First it was on the offensive side of the ball, then he saw both inside linebackers exit, and an outside backer get hurt, and lost his best athletic corner (lst round pick), and still made his team competitive.
It may have been schemes or scams, smoke and mirrors, chewing gum and wire, but his leadership held the roster together.
Credit the quarterback for willing his team to nine victories.
Credit the coach for keeping the team emotionally in gear, never letting them feel sorry for themselves, never letting doubt creep into meetings rooms, never letting them cave in anywhere during a 60-minute game.
He brought accountability and a degree of toughness to the Fortress not seen since the early days of Martyball, or the Boss-Ross era.
Mike McCoy was the sales pitch guy, who found a way to game plan around whomever was standing up to play Sunday-by-Sunday.
When healthy, with lots of bullets in the gun, the offense was very dangerous. When key players went down, when they could not run, when they could not pass protect, they went to max protection packages and found a way to move the ball.
When they were falling apart in the secondary because of hurt players, they used every exotic blitz package possible to stem the tide, and create chaos with quarterbacks, and found a way to get tougher in the red zone..
They took guys off the street, taught them the system, fought with an outmanned defensive line, and coached them up to compete..
You may not like Mike McCoy’s condescending attitude “in the best interest of the team”. I don’t like the generic lies about about injuries. He and his first year coordinator Frank Reich may have made mistakes in clock management and conservative play calls in down and distance situations. But all that is second guessing more than anything else. But look at the big picture, what they dealt with, what they accomplished.
Just compare the plight of the injury ravaged Bolts to other teams, who got badly hurt. Atlanta lost virtually its entire offensive line and secondary, and their coach got fired. Tennessee lost its quarterback, much of its OL, and went (2-14). It went sour in Chicago, the quarterback went south, and the coach and GM are gone.
The trauma in San Diego was worse in terms of the numbers of key guys hurt, and they won 9-and were in the playoff race till the final Sunday of the season. Credit McCoy for preventing the ship from going down.
What you have to like is his ability to get his players to believe; you have to like his resourcefulness to use whatever he had on game day, to make the team compete; and you have to like his ability to create packages that are productive.
Think McCoy and all the horrors around him, and remind yourself this is the coach who devised something to make Tim Tebow dangerous in Denver, to get the the playoffs and win a game. Yes, that Tim Tebow, out of football since, unable to find a job because of limited passing skills. That’s the quarterback McCoy found pages in the playbook that played to whatever strengths he had.
His two year record is (10-8) and (9-7) came in a tough division, with a battered roster two years in a row. (19-17) does not seem impressive, but look beyond the record, look at the rosters and understand the situations, and realize what he accomplished..
McCoy did not allow the Chargers to become the Bears or Saints or Jets, and that is an accomplishment of the coach and the man.
Please follow and like us:
I concur 100 percent.