In this weekly look forward, taking one question per club, Matt Doyle answers an "Is Vermes in the hotseat" question by saying that he should not be as coach, but should be as GM, or in this case I would suspect sporting director. In any case, he's suggesting that Vermes needs to step back from player decisions and focus on the team. A quote from his piece: "Not as head coach, and that's as it should be. Sporting have taken it on the chin this year as a bunch of the on-field gambles Peter Vermes has made have failed to pay off, but the underlying numbers still like them a lot, they still often pass the eye test, and I honestly think they're only one or two good moves away from being a playoff team again next year. I'm not sure I trust Vermes the GM to make those moves, though. Shipping out Ike Opara in favor of Andreu Fontas will go down as one of the worst moves in recent league history, but that might've been topped by handing the center forward job to the combo of Krisztian Nemeth and Erik Hurtado. The lack of a hard-man d-mid hurt bad, as did a flagrant lack of pace at both fullback slots. Add in some regression from Tim Melia (I thought he was the best 'keeper in the league from 2015-18, and he is definitely not that this year), and that is... pungent." Doyle is making the assumption that Vermes is in charge of all player movement, discounting Bliss. This, to me, seems pretty fair. From a distance, SKC las off season seemed to be Vermes' project. But is this correct? Beyond that, is moving Vermes out of the SD/manager role and expecting him to stay in the coach only role a reasonable expectation? Is that the way Vermes rolls? Is Doyle correct? Is it time to add a caveat to the "in PV we trust" motto? Or was this an incredibly unlucky roll of the dice for PV, and he deserves and will get a chance to roll again this off season?
Vermes has final say in all player movement. No I can't see Vermes doing a separation of the TD and coach role. If he leaves one it'd be to move back to only being TD (with his hand picked replacement taking over). Vermes will get the chance to do a rebuild with this team he's earned that from what he's done in 2009-2018 as head coach and what he's done 2006-2018 as TD. His leash has just gotten shorter.
Yeah, I think Pete is all or nothing. I don't see him being happy coaching players he did not personally vet, I don't see him being happy stepping back from coaching duties either. I think Buzz is spot on--his leash is shorter, but nothing else has changed yet. I've said it a bunch this season, but Pete has earned cushion for a poor year. If he can't reload and come back with a better, more competitive squad next season, then I think the's in the hot seat. I said it here or reddit, can't remember, but Vermes makes changes much faster if things aren't working. When the team is leading narrowly or holding onto a good result, he barely makes any subs. When they're losing, he subs big and early and often. My estimation is this offseason will look like a manager with a pretty good roster is realizing that they can't get the job done. And with luck, the expansion draft might pick up a player or two we don't really want or need, freeing up their contracts and giving us some bonus allocation money.
yeah, removing the td from vermes leaves him in his weaker job as head coach. everyone loses in that scenario.
I'm actually kind of surprised the Rubio/Rowe/_AM trade is even mentioned in the same paragraph as the Opara/Fontas fiasco. Yeah, Rowe was a bust, but we still got $300k in allocation money for Rubio, and Nemeth DID replace Rubio's numbers this year - even if it was extremely front-loaded and not exactly effective in scope of the entire season. My biggest consideration is... I don't think Rubio changes a damn thing if he's here this season. He's not a Dom Dwyer, he's not going to power anyone off a ball, or make things happen up top all by himself. He needs the entire system working - like we had in 2018 - to be successful. Just spit-balling into the hypothetical, but I really think he would have looked just as poor as Hurtado or Salloi or Post-May Nemeth if he'd been with us this season. And that's not to say the Rubio/Rowe/_AM trade was a good one - it wasn't, clearly - it just pales in comparison to the disaster that was spending $1M on a player who can't break the starting XI which in turn pushed the former DOTY away because you can't afford to triple his salary. We might as well have spent $1M to get rid of Opara with no replacement. Catastrophic.
Maybe this gets to Doyle's point, though. Vermes had a vision for how he wanted his team to play. Fontas would not have been such an obvious defensive liability if SKC kept the ball for 70-99 percent of games. Vermes, however, didn't have the personal to carry out that vision. Could a dedicated, full-time TD/GM/SD have identified and signed a better Opara replacement for Vermes vision? I tend to think not, as for everything for which I believe PV does well, his greatest weakness is flexibility, and SKC was never going to put together the players he was going to need for the side he wanted to put on the field. That's a roster that requires a ton of luck, or a huge spend (and i mean 8-28x what we spent for Fontas. I mean, really, Boatang is getting phased out at Bmunch, you know, there's a option... But that's the level of upgrade we needed to replace Opara's defense while greatly upgrading his ability to play the ball). Of course, that's 2019. Clearly, PV will get it all correct and 2020 will be our year.