aj. said:
As everyone knows, I buy into the wrong path theory and C&C are the scout leaders.
When I look at this team, I'm reminded of a term that's used in the manufacturing, quality improvement and statistics arenas called Process Capability.
It's a measure of whether your process, be it an assembly line, a single CNC machine or whatever, is capable of consistently producing a product to meet specifications. When a process is out of control, you must first know whether it's capable of producing good product in the first place. If it's not, you can tweak the settings all you want but you're still producing scrap way too often.
In this team's case, the process inputs are the management, scouting, offensive and defensive systems, coaching, and players. The outputs are wins and losses. Typically there are upper and lower bounds for the acceptable product (specification limits) but in this product's case there is no upper bound - only a lower bound that's somewhere around 8 or 9 wins.
It's obvious that this process is both out of control and incapable of consistently producing a product within the specification limits.
So what do you do when you have a process that's incapable? Change the process - or shift the mean - so that you can produce a product that is withing spec limits. How do you change the process or shift the mean? Easy.
Look at the inputs (management, scouting, offensive and defensive systems, coaching, and players) and adjust them based on empirical data, experimentation, and/or expert judgement until the output is consistently satisfactory.
To make a long boring story short, remove Capers (god love him) and Casserly from the process and replace them with new management, supervision, and operators; get higher quality material (players) and restart the machine in January.
A bump in the road? Please.