IndyMark Posted January 5, 2006 Posted January 5, 2006 Well put my mark down in the heretic column as though I agree with folks that Gray's wprk certainly was not productive at all this year, his work in 2003 and in 2004 was quite impressive IMHO. I think he is not the perfect coach as his initial work as DC for GW was not prodyctuve and his work within the madhouse run by TD and MM this year also showed that he does not have the ability to overcome a bad context snd the great ones make their own context. However, Gray impressed me with these specifics: 1. The Bills D under Gray was horrid in 2001 and 2002, but as the team was going through cap hell giving them a mulligan for 2001 (particularly with the injury to Cowart and the dumb contract work of cutting JH and HJ). Gray also deserves to be reamed for his role in buying into or promoting the idea of Robinson having enough left at LB and Jenkins having enough left at safety. I blame GW the most for these assessment errors as the HC who used to coach these guys should have known better if this was Gray's error out of some misplaced loyalty for old teammates, but if this as primarily GW's idea then I actually give Gray a positive mark for managing well with these players who could not cut it. 2. I started becoming impressed with Gray with the 2003 finish of this D in the top 5 statistically in the league. This was clearly driven by the switch to the LeBeau run-blitz scheme from the GW 4-3 scheme which did not work with the Bills not having a Jevon Kearse talent at DE or a Blaine Bishop at SS. Gray impressed me because though I assumed he retained the DC title only so there was no clear demonstration that GW deserved to be fired after his second year (despite the O dragging the team to an 8-8 record after GW's first choice Sheppard got canned). However, Gray demonstrate an ability to master the LeBeau scheme incredibly quickly as he did the day of game playcalling effectively with a totally different D than he was trained in. 3. The again suprising decision to me that LeBeau was gone and Gray got the full reins in 2004, i think really was a tour de force in great work by Gray in 2004. If in fact, the D sucess was all LeBeau' work, I think we would see some real signs of that in 2004 in its production. LeBeau was not going to be around to gameplan each week nor would he be there to make adjustments at halftime to deal with places where he gameplan wa not working. I really expected the statistical production to drop into the top 10 at best without LeBeau here, instead the D performance improved and I think it is not credible to not give Gray some of the credit for this importance or attribute this gain to all to LeBeau (not to mention GW as giving him credit for this D's spotty good performancs is simply silly). Gray showed a great ability to diagnose, design and implement adjustments (the tour de force was the run D adjustment against Miami which shut down Sammy Morris who shredded the team in the first half). Though sometimes the gameplan was not great, he easily balanced this and produced good results with some great midgame adjustments last year. Gray also was very impressive last year with some coverage changes he designed and implemented using the bye week last year and it seemed to be a key part of the greatly improved Bills production in the second half of last season as they started 0-4 but then peeled off a massive winning streak until they ran into LeBeau the master in Pitts in the last game. This brings us back to this year and the piss=poor performance. I have no problem with the Bills moving on to another DC. The key to this league is producion and what have you done for me lately. The D did not produce this year and with that Gray can reasonably be gone. However, to simply declare him incompetent simply strikes me as the usual disppointed whining of hurt fans and ignores the fact that Gray can play a very good role and do great work if the other facets of the team are also working well. The Bills need to right the leadership of state for this team at GM, and with a good GM who is not passive/aggressive scared of getting fired again by an HC he hired I think as in 2003 and 04. Gray has demonstrated he can do th job productively after a bad start. With a good GM, I think he could do the job in 2006. 554827[/snapback] Yes, but what about his work in 2005? It does speak for itself doesn't it? Sure TS was injured, but TS surely wasn't lighting up the field prior to the injury. And SA, had conflicts with JG as well as MM> While JG is probably a decent man and a good defensive coach he surely is not NFL DC coach material based on the D's performance this season. An utter failure on several levels. This may be the best move for the Bills this offseason...the BEST.
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