Thread TL;DR. What will it take for me not to call for BO'B's head? If his ASS is already gone. That's it. At this point, there is nothing short of him being gone that will make me happy. I am finished with the Bill O'Brien experiment. He had three years to put an OL in place for whatever QB he eventually settled on. He kept throwing garbage out there. When he finally settled on a good QB, the OL was total garbage. So he traded away any shot at improving other deficiencies to try and cover up that one major deficiency that he's responsible for.
He can't manage a clock. Honest to God, the man has zero fkn clue about time management during a game. And I do separate the time management brain cramps from the concept that things happen really fast out there and it's hard to make decisions under duress of the clock. I get that. He's bad at that aspect as well. That 4th down go for it/neverming kick a FG moment? That was a decision that had to be made under duress of clock. I separate that from the worst example of burning two timeouts on a failed challenge. He's not good at either.
The fact that we continue to have this debate about Watson getting the ball out on time when the All-22 shows no one open much of the time baffles me. We used to have a coach that could scheme anyone open. Hell, I'd bet Kubiak could scheme my old ass open for a second or two. O'Brien can't scheme open what is, IMO, a top-5 WR corps. When Watson hits the back foot of his drop, there needs to be somewhere to go with the ball. And oh yeah, preferably no one in Watson's face for another second.
His "I need to be better" mantra after every loss has all the sincerity of his apology for using profanity in the tunnel at Denver. He continues to tell us he needs to be better, and he continues to tell us it's on him. Whatever other issues I may have with O'Brien the coach, I don't believe O'Brien the man is a liar. So I say we take the man at his word.
He's not a terrible coach. He does some things well. His influence on the roster has been positive once you ignore the OL and TEs and go down to about #40 and beyond on the roster. The guys clearly play hard for him. He's a leader of men. But his W-L record is pretty indicative of the type of coach he is. He only got better than slightly below average once Watson came along, so now his record says he is slightly above average. Either way, he's not the guy.
Time to move on.