riggofan wrote:There is no number. Snyder could fire the Shanahans today, and I would argue that they have already done plenty of good for the franchise.
Me too. I also hope they don't get fired today.
1) Got Vinny Cerrato the hell out of here. Pushed Snyder out of football ops.
2) Cleaned up our terrible salary cap practices. Take a look at the amount of dead money on our books now compared to other teams. We only have something like $100K of dead money on the books. Compare that to the Cowboys who have $11M.
3) Four years of quality draft picks. Compare his picks with Cerrato.
4) Brought in Pierre Garcon.
6) Unexpectedly took us to a playoff game last year with a rookie QB.
7) This one is debatable but IMO drafted the player who should be our franchise QB for the next 5-7 years at least.
Agreed on all these points.
5) Finally found a REAL KICKER. Anybody want to take a look at our history of kickers the past 20 years. Its the only thing worse than our history of QBs the past two decades.
But I part ways with you here. I really wish Kai Forbath was a keeper, because we will never get another kicker with as cool a nickname. But . . . he just doesn't have the leg to be a long-term solution. And I suspect he really is maxing out his production on kickoffs with us, what with the undersized shoe and all that. We need someone who can boot the ball out of the endzone half the time and force touchbacks another 25% of the time. Forbath rarely gets it into the endzone. Despite his nice run on FGs last year, I also don't see him as a clutch, game-winning kicker either.
I've said this many times before, but if this is what we got from Shanahan the past four years, I am satisfied. Finally getting rid of Vinny was the best thing to happen to this franchise in a decade. Even St. Joe didn't do that for us.
If Shanahan gets another year to see what he can do with this team, I'm ok with it. If not, I think he's fixed a lot of issues and put down a foundation that the next coaching staff has something legit to work with.
Agreed.