It must suck having ownership as bad as they do in SD. I can see giving Smith a little more rope because he drafts pretty well but Turner is an awful HC and keeping him is solely about money and that is a piss poor way to run a team.
AJ is the root problem though. He hires and fires the coaches seemingly based on personality and deference to him. It's about power as opposed to $$. And he really doesn't draft all that well. He's a talent whore kind of like Al was, and a really lousy judge of character, and he doesn't know how to build a roster top to bottom and a team that can battle through adversity because it's not allowed to be over reliant on overhyped talent and he has fueled the perception that talent in general and the talent he's assembled trumps all to the point his players buy all in.
He's got a big ego like his players and he's a proponent of the GM as builder trumps coach school of thought. His top heavy approach is a lot like Polian's who he worked under in Buffalo and who similarly believes the GM is the key component in winning (and conversely losing is always someone else's fault, probably the HC or a coordinator). Only he's had even less $$$ to work with making if near impossible to retain enough proven talent to build a team around. And he's abrasive and vindictive and an alienator like Polian, too. Bill had a whole lot more success in the same time span, yet his ass got canned already. It's too bad (for SD though not for us) because due to location alone it's a job that would likely appeal to a couple of HC's currently on sabatical but not with AJ at the helm. He wants a low ego puppet HC who serves as fall guy to remain between him and the unemployment line. Spanos is making a huge mistake and has been for a while now considering he needs a new stadium deal and winning greases the skids for those - which was what Polian knew and why he and Irsay lasted as long as they did. It was all about securing the stadium, that Lombardi was just the cherry on the top. But now, having won one and been to another it's all about Lombardi's going forward, and actually winning those was never Bill's strong suit.
People wonder why Dungy bailed as early as he did. He saw the writing on the wall in Indy. He had the owners support but Bill had the roster and staffing and cap control to marginalize him at will. Once they got over the top and got the monkey off his and Manning's back Dungy's internal clock started ticking even faster. The year after that win he coached a team that fielded 19 players who had never taken a snap in the NFL. He also saw Manning get crumpled like a pretzel in what was potentially the beginning of the end of his heyday against Washington that season and he did the math. And he knew that Moore and Mudd and the core coaches and scouts who helped keep Polian's rosters propped up around Manning were getting squeezed out as much over power and influence shifting to Polian's kid as money. Sure Caldwell was the beneficiary of his leaving a year or two too soon, sort of a last hurrah of the decade for the Colts, but that was preferable to Dungy to leaving a year or two too late...or getting canned with his legacy of quiet strength in tatters...
Guys like Norv will never leave voluntarily because they know they are on their last shot. Makes them a perfect ego match for a guy like AJ or a guy like Polian until the owner wakes the F up and realizes it has nothing to do with winning...and it's time to find a GM who gets that winning consistently and not building or maintaining a GM's personal power base is the goal. That's a concept Woody Johnson is going to come face to face with over the next season or two, too. Because everything he's done since 2005, from signing Mangini to drafting Gholston to taking a flyer on Favre to reaching for a Sanchize to signing a blowhard DC Baltimore wouldn't entrust it's own franchise to trading for and rewarding bad boys smart coaches and GM's were done with while couched in terms of winning now has really been engineered towards launching and maintaining Tannenbaum's career as a GM and elevating his profile via media spin... Yet he's surrounded himself with such a plethora of perfect foils to take the fall ahead of him in Mangini and Favre and Schottenheimer and Mark and Santonio and Rex that the good news for Patsfans is he's likely to hang in there a few years beyond all reason...before Woody makes his next GM mistake...
They say that the one job Cowher is holding out for is Coughlin's and if that transpires in the next season or two Woody's head will explode and that is when Tannenbaum will likely face the music.
There is so much drama behind the scenes in football FO's. I know the media here laments we don't get to experience any of that and they'd love to create some. Thank god Bill and Tom have the wherewithall to flumox them at every turn...
