Campbell's numbers dont lie

[GTripp0012]

Originally Posted by BigHairedAristocrat

You made a lot of great points and I agreed with most of it except what you said here. With 5 undisputedly "good" (not great) players on offense last year we should have been much better than we were. This year, we've lost a couple of those guys and others have declined. However, I think one of the key problems with our entire offense is that we don't have the right personnel to run it. Like it or not, Campbell is simply not suited to be a WCO Quarterback. Can he do it - sure. Any QB can play the WCO if he has to - but the key is he can't do it well. Then there's Portis, who has bulked up from his denver days and is a power runner, he's not explosive and not a great pass-catcher either - not the right type of feature back for a WCO. And we can complain all we want about how bad our O-line is, because it is bad, but its not the right type of offensive line to run a WCO. Even when healthy, the line wasnt light or agile enough to run the WCO effectively.

When it boils down to it, Vinny and Danny made a huge mistake by hiring a WCO coach and not replacing the current offensive personnel. As a result, they've wasted two years of everyones time and wasted alot of potential.

We were arguably the best offensive team in the NFL for the first half of the season. It's because of the miserable failures since then that it seems like so gosh darn long ago, but what we did have was working. We were, in part because of two wins over cupcakes, 6-2. Three games before, we were a very legit 4-1, and one of the best five teams in football. That was with the WCO. There was nothing fluky about that performance that wouldn't also apply to the first six games of this season.

From that point forward, decline set in and things were clearly different. The OL cracked and later broke. The lack of depth at WR really set in when our running game became unproductive. None of these things have the first thing to do with the WCO. It wasn't un-normal decline, or decline related to the expansion of the WCO, and contrary to popular reporting, the run fits did not change in the middle of the season.

Campbell has both played in the WCO well and poorly over the last 22 games. He has reached the highest point in his career (Week 7), and the lowest (the 2009 offseason) playing in the same offense. He hasn't been terrible this year, but at age 27, we're getting somewhere close to whatever he's going to be in this offense. Eli Manning is an exception to the rule, as he endured a horrific regular season in his 3rd full year as a starter, but played on a team that lucked into the playoff, and has since raised his level of play.

Ultimately, though, the comparison ends there. Eli plays for an organization who--even though they gave up more to get him than we gave for Campbell--never moved to scapegoat him for any offensive issues they might have had. We on the other hand, have systematically sabotaged anything we might have gotten from Campbell at the conclusion of his development through horrendous personnel decisions and complete mis-management.

What I said in the offseason still rings true: if this organization can't win with Campbell, then they can't win without him. Major organizational changes will be necessary to ever have an offense that can produce points consistently, and that means that whoever is building the 2010 team cannot worry about who the QB of the team is. Campbell or anyone else. Too many other pressing issues: offensive and defensive, must be taken care of first.