Good post, Omega.
I post a lot of shit about Garrett because, well, he's so much worse a coach than we could have and he does have that arrogance that he's always the smartest guy in the room about everything. But to be more serious for a minute, here's what I really think about Garrett:
I think when he came in that 2007 season and Tony lit it up -- especially on third down conversions, where Tony had IIRC one of the best 3rd down and long yardage conversion percentages ever -- Garrett thought it was all him. He thought he really was this genius that some had tabbed him to be. He didn't realize that it was really 1) Tony's first full season as starter 2) TO still being a beast 3) Sparano understanding how to use the running game. If he'd had more experience and/or more humility, he'd have realized that performance wasn't sustainable, but of course he didn't.
And when things turned disappointing in 2008 and full-on disastrous in 2010, well, that was all Wade's fault, like everyone said. And why not -- he had an owner who loved him and fans and media who blamed it all on fat, dumb, country Wade and not-so-secretly couldn't wait for prodigy coach-in-waiting to take the reins. Garrett was a Princeton man; no doubt he was vastly superior in pretty much every way to this rube from Houston. If he could just do things his way, the team would play to its potential right away.
So when he took over in 2010 and the team started winning, which carried over into a 7-4 start the next year, it just reinforced his belief that he really was that good. All he needed to do was stand tall, speak in a commanding voice with proper grammar, put the team in pads more often, and bingo, the ship was righted. Just like he suspected, this team was woefully underperfoming before -- all it needed was him. This job wasn't hard at all. He was born to do this.
But then... Total collapse at the end of 2011. Suckage almost all of 2012. A 9-12 record since that glorious 12-7 start. Turns out this head coaching business isn't so easy after all.
And I think he's not sure what to do. That's why he gets so defensive and tells everyone how great his offense has been since he took over and how we've played for the East title two years in a row. (Never mind that it was to win the worst East in at least six or seven years, and that it never should have come down to a last game in 2011 if he hadn't lost four of our last five in that year's collapse.)
In a nutshell, he just doesn't know what he's doing. He doesn't have the experience. Which ties his Ivy League brain in knots, because geniuses are supposed to be able to bypass experience.
Or, something no one talks about, he's simply not a talented coach. Some people act like with more time under his belt, he's necessarily going to be good, but it's very likely that he simply wasn't born with the gift that the best coaches have. A Parcells or Jimmy or even Holmgren were born with more talent than the rest to lead, to call games, to manage people, to do all those hard-to-define things that the best coaches do. No different than anything else in life.
TLDR version -- this is the risk you take when you anoint a relative kid who never proved anything other than a family proclivity for kissing Jerry ass.
k
