Ouch. Seems Quinn misidentified his top options and now has to react, instead of proactively going after realistic targets.
Some will say, that’s odd, the Blough promotion was so decisive, it happened so quickly as to be obviously proactive! So why the difference? I disagree. I think being scared into going with Blough after three days, without interviewing any other real competition for the job, was the definition of reactive. Because the Lions’ interest made us jump early and dictated our entire process. That’s also reactive, just in a different way.
Everyone here, while hopeful, seemed to acknowledge that Flores was likely not a real option (HC or MIN DC), and that Ulbrich was very likely to be retained in ATL. It was reported everywhere that it’s what ATL ownership wanted.
So why are we seemingly taken by surprise by these outcomes? Seems we overcommitted to the idea that they may have been realistic options.
Just makes us look disorganized and out of touch. And now we’re adding names to our interview list without playcalling experience, later in the process. Making it clear we whiffed on our top options, so we can’t even pretend we got our guy in the end.
At least with Quinn they laid the groundwork with Keim early to keep an eye on him, they at least gave pushing the idea that he was their top guy the good ol’ college try. They tried to convince people.
This feels like settling for a bridge staff during a bridge year. Bizarre. Feels like if we had someone even remotely qualified or interesting already on staff, we’d be witnessing an in-house DC promotion as well. We don’t so we may accidentally end up with some new ideas in the building anyways.