Houston Chronicle column

[Shane]

Originally Posted by Daseal

Shane - when the team is playing amazing football everywhere but where Gibbs is supposed to be running the ship, I feel there's room for criticism. Does that mean you kick them out? Absolutely not, but it doesn't mean you have to sit there and support them. Am I backing away from being a skins fan? Am I trying to get a new coach? No. I defend the skins to everyone who tries to attack them, but that doesn't mean everything is will in skins land.

I agree that there is room to talk about things you want to see differently, Daseal. To me, it's easy to look for one cause for a problem, when things are complicated. I just reject scapegoating.

It seems like fans typically the approach of "this guy is sacred and any statement that you find fault with what he is doing is deserving of sharp rebuke," or "this bum is the cause of all the problems and I won't listen to any viewpoint that says otherwise!"

To me, the trouble with views like this - and I'm not saying this is what you're doing Daseal - is that they are based on emotion and not on realism. And as a fan, I make emotional judgments sometimes that aren't fair to the people involved.

I was criticizing Ramsey unfairly for example saying that his decision making was effected by nerves and that he didn't look at the whole field enough. That is something that isn't nice to say for one thing, and there are other explanations for some of the choices Ramsey made that didn't work, besides that. Things are complicated.

And because they are complicated, and its hard to walk a mile in another person's moccasins to see what they are seeing, usually it is better to lay off harsh criticism.