My feeling, just to generalize, so many facets take into account as to why the team collapsed this year. Yes, you can put the onus on Sanchez for not making strides from the past 2 years experience. The beatings he has taken over the past 15 games, you can't blame the guy for having happy feet. It's not all his fault: remember how bad the OL was without Mangold? Shotts has to take the brunt of it though, imo. His predictable 50/50 run pass ratio - he calls plays to fill a quota, not to strategize down by down. The Giant game was an exception - but he picked the wrong tactic - they should have ran the ball more. When it comes to making key stops in the 4th quarter, how many times has the D let us down? Talk about swiss cheese. Penalties, turnovers, special team bungles, poor tackling, terrible first/2nd quarter starts....it goes on and on. There's really not one main glaring issue here: all phases just out and out went and took a big dump down the toilet. I think we expected too much here. Of course this leads to what happens during the offseason....but's that's something many here will have a lot to say about, for sure.
Best thing to do is to cut ties with Schottenheimer, overpay to bring in a bright offensive mind to run the offense, and give Sanchez one more year. At that point, I don't want to hear excuses about the new coordinator or it's his first year in the system or anything like that. 4 years is more than enough to find out what you have in my opinion. As I said, he's not the problem. But the league has become so pass-reliant that if you want to be a great team, you need a great QB.
