Buffalo Bills' Doug Marrone: rate your level of optimism

Buffalo Bills head coach Doug Marrone is not an unpopular man within the team's fan base at the moment, even while he hasn't yet taken the field for a pre-season game in his new job. 60 percent of the Buffalo Rumblings community approved of his hiring in January, and his popularity has risen by another 20 percent in the past few months.

Still, the level of optimism Marrone engenders varies from fan to fan, so we're posing this question to you as a discussion starter this morning: when was the last time you felt this optimistic about a new Bills coaching hire?

Perhaps you're still playing the skeptical card on Marrone (or are even stubbornly pessimistic about him), and you only have to go as far back as Chan Gailey or Dick Jauron - two of the more uninspiring coaching hires in the history of the franchise - to recall a similar level of optimism. Or maybe you're bullish on HCDM, and you skip right over the Tom Donahoe era (Mike Mularkey and Gregg Williams) to land on Wade Phillips, the hand-picked successor to a Hall of Fame head coach (Marv Levy).

This is a tough topic to debate - it's rather difficult to tell another fan that the level of optimism they're feeling about an unknown entity is wrong, after all - but it's an interesting question to mull on a personal level. My answer: Mularkey. What's yours?