His schemes and lack of adjustments ALWAYS seem to get overwhelmed against the good opponents. The Dallas game last year was a good example of him having a good scheme, something different and it worked. Usually, there’s little creativity and for some reason he doesn’t adjust that well when things are going wrong….It’s been an ongoing problem, IMO, but it doesn’t show up all the time….

The fact that he seems to have prepared only for one style of AZ offense (the long bomb O) and had no clue as to what to do when they came out firing in the 3-8 yard range to set up the run is the sign of a coach not doing enough homework.

He has had MANY bad games the past 3 seasons now Brian, its just masked by the fact that everyone wants to blame the players for those poor performances everytime. Yes our guys have played badly on a regular basis it seems during that time, but poor scheming and poor preparation can have one hell of a hand in it seeming that way. Its the classic coach defense “Yeah we won today because we had a great scheme and the guys ececuted it well” or “Yeah we lost today because our guys just couldn’t get it done” even though that second line should be “Yeah we lost today because the opposing team decided to change things up and I didn’t even know they could run the slant and I had no idea that LBs can’t keep up with WRs and I just pooped my pants and let it all go to hell because I can blame the players for a shoddy performance and maybe I won’t be canned at the end of the season if we win 9 games.”

As K said, if the competition is of lesser or equal caliber, Fewell can skate by sometimes, but seems surprised when the other team does the unexpected and never really recovers. Against top flight competition, were going to see him struggle more, not saying he cannot rise to occassion sometimes, please see Dallas last year as K noted.

I’ve always been down on Fewell, I won’t lie about that Brian, but thats because I think there are many other DCs out there who make better on the fly adjustments. Fewell is great if the opponent plays him the way he game plans it, if they don’t our team D goes to hell scheme wise and then were down to relying on the players abilities and intuition to win the game on the defensive side of the ball. Not a good situation, at all.

I’m not saying it didn’t help, but if there were no adjustments against those teams, then we would have seen the same problems in the second half. Ergo, adjustments. If the Bills could dominate just by showing up, as you posit, then they would have shut those teams down in the first half, too.