Brian, would you be a pal and just download your solid blog efforts on that one thread you posted when you introduced yourself to our boards?
It's a good way to put, "doing the same thing as the last regime but actually be good at it." So far we've seen nothing really to suggest that change is on the way. But it's not over yet.
the second line is basically my overall point which you just obnoxiously called street preaching in another thread and we have DPs to burn etc but my point is they ain't done squat yet and until they spend it i don't know (a) timeframe (this window? more waiting?) (b) spend (serious? halfa$$?) (c) quality. (is this going to have a playoff chance or are we going to take sides over relatively weak players while this plays out like 90% of seasons since 2014) the people criticizing me are being fairly dishonest and indirect. there is no spend so they are giving me crap for going after the owner. who's had the team half a year and it is what it is. i need to back off and await spend some more. the dallas discussion of recently gets at the distinction between getting money in and spending it out on the players and staff. i'm not even denying maybe this gambling thing happens. setting aside my personal moral issues, my deal is i thought he would spend money, he's not, and on the OPM we will see when that transitions from revenue back out the door as spending. i feel like people are playing their game in getting hyper about revenue we don't have yet like it equates to spending on that day. my deal as a soccer fan is sign people now, this window, for me to watch. i have done enough waiting. i am not interested in inside baseball implications of how if x is coming that implies y going out soon enough. i find that a little naive. i am waiting for soccer players. not sponsor announcements. we spend way too much time discussing inside baseball because we are waiting for a sign of change. but as soccer fans that's naive. you should be watching for the obvious. when they sign better players then the team improves. reading corporate tea leaves is just a proxy basis for optimism. i am not doing proxies. i want players. the actual thing i want. not community chest cards or revenue. i am getting cranky because he said he was bringing resources by his lonesome. it's a little bait and switch to be saying, well, when the OPM from sponsorship comes in, then we'll spend. at that point you're testing my patience and trying to get me on board with the inside baseball corporate games. all told my concept is simple. sign good soccer players. do it. if the team still sucks come february i am on strike. new revenue streams are not players to get excited about.
It wasn't an insult but damn dude, you write in such a cryptic manner it seems like a language only you can understand.
re ramos, i wished him well his first opening day and was there. if they field good enough a team i will be rooting come opening day. i will root for the new staff. but i separate that from my horse sense of whether the various personnel are up to the task. this bunch so far, not yet. too much continuity. too little added quality. too much hope based effort. the basic problem here is we are cheap and always doing the value "betting" thing instead of "resourced" and doing the more obvious thing. you go hire arena or bradley or marsch and pay the market rate. you don't save a buck and hire ramos and make a bet that he's the 1% of future coaches who joins that elite. ditto signing insigne vs quintero. obvious serie A scorer vs bring back someone and hope. the odds on hope are bad. maybe alex or fafa is good but 5-10 other hopefuls suck as bad as before. their bets don't pay off. problem is we need 11 players and 1 in 10 odds is a slow way to assemble a soccer team. i'm not interested in the ramos optimism before or the regret after. he was a bet. the bet didn't pay. if we're playing that game we can't be sentimental. i wish him well coming. i wish him well in the future. it just objectively didn't work in any tangible sense here. even if you want to play more cheap value games, move on to the next value bet. but the team is only going to suck worse if we double down on bad choices or get sentimental.
re onstad, i am leery of over-selling "process." USSF sold and sold and sold the process to hire berhalter. berhalter sucks. i judge the output. if the output is questionable i am either skeptical the process was followed or believe the process doesn't actually work. on nagamura, i think we pretty much believe that after all the process talk we just signed who was available. i believe the process stuff is basically front office aggrandizement. here is how serious we are. maybe we should be more the face of this thing because we are so smart and process driven. i am disinterested in fanboying FO people doing displays before their GM acquires or HC coaches. i judge who the process spits out the end. both choices are disappointing. worse, you can see where we just hired a TD who sounds like he has a lot of a GM portfolio. so now we are adding layers of bureaucracy. another dude responsible for cap and scouting. we keep adding executives while the team gets worse. how about focus on the soccer team.
re "style," i find it dubious when the GM is saying what the style is. his job is to GM. what i want from him is his personnel philosophy. if the GM is telling me how we will coach we have a job description problem. a key thing you're missing is, while giddily waving off our concept won't get bruce, the org chart has to attract someone else. if they suck, we continue to suck. if we are screwing up at the org chart level your "wave off" is the kiss of death. the whole question is whether we have to empower and pay the HC more to get the quality of coach we want to compete at the desired level. you have made a recent mantra of vaguely saying "why would someone come here" without getting at the actual reasons why. we don't have kidnappings. it's not the heat. if you got into actual reasons you'd probably start refuting your own theories. and it's a little weird for someone to be a supposed die hard who then says why the hell come here.
people can think i am arrogant all they want. i noticed nagamura using "bar" metaphors like i did yesterday and this morning. i can't be sure they read anything but if they do i am sure as heck not blowing fake smoke up their tookus that i naively believe it will work. i will respond when it looks good. they haven't looked good going into preseason since 2017. when i see that i will say as much. i think it's silly to encourage them to underestimate what is needed. we do that over and over.
all the value analysis is silly. at this point we need upgrade soccer players. we kept a few people. question is are you better than what we had that just finished last. clark is maybe a slight upgrade. the defense in front of him sucks. quintero back is not an upgrade, it's a GM flex, he is the same player. steres, meh. i need to start seeing name soccer players better than the old team. you need to see enough improved positions where this gets to the red line. slapping some paint on the same team is not a red line strategy. sorry but every indicator i see so far is we blame ramos for everything and think we can fix this with a new coach, scheme, and a handful of fresh faces. i do think we should have been more competitive but this was not a red line roster last year and it would be low percentage odds a great coach could just coach the same bunch to the playoffs. and this is a minor league hack not bruce arena. we underestimate what MLS requires. the 2017 signings included one of the leading regional forwards and a former MLS defender of the year, multiple internationals. about every forward we signed for 2 years -- 4 guys -- could score 10-20 goals a season. we had a 10 in the mid teens on assists. and that FINISHED 4TH.
last point, i find the pressing ideas to be more cute bull hockey. what we need is team defense. the only "pressing" i have seen as effective team defense is like italy or atleti. swarming and the next 2 lines are pressed up just the same. otherwise you just spread your lines and naively dive into the offensive buzzsaw. good teams can pass and dribble around a press. i also find it cute we think a coach with double GA to GF is a defensive maven. whether he is coaching rotating kids or not. any abilities he has should be manifesting somehow. like good but imperfect GA since his roster changes. his GA sucks. i giggle. SKC played as naive of no defense soccer as we did. we hired someone who was available. he may be asked to press but he won't be some press coach maven. not with how many GA they had. to suggest otherwise is malarkey. when barrett coached, we sucked, but the one thing they did was keep GA way down and tie games. a competent coach can drill a team into some defintive concept that manifests in the numbers. the idea that a coach is hamstrung beyond results and stats is self serving crap. a good coach can squeeze what he wants out of anything decent.
i think what davis is saying is utter horse-hooey. arena, bradley, porter did not start out MLS worldbeaters and NT/YNT coaches. before they did it in MLS or internationally they did it with U23s in college. new team of kids every 4 years. porter won NCAA once. bradley got princeton to a final four. arena won NCAA several times before he got DC. you win at a level, step up, win at that level, step up, etc. they can each identify talent and build a team. part of the sign you can do it this level is ever doing it before someplace else. and while a list of elite players passed through (nagbe, marsch, meola, reyna) they also won. we have done this "youth development coach" crap 2 times already. unless we deliberately sign kids they end up coaching 28 year old veterans. that's a talent ID, scheme, and subbing job. it's a different job. i also think it's straining when we give a reserve team coach credit for leading academy graduates. name someone who wasn't supposed to be a star and did. i think we're straining very hard when it's like it doesn't matter W and L at all, it's a few players who came through the system. not a list like dallas. a handful. should we give holocher or clarkson the head job? memo was ok.
the deal is based on the efforts so far i would put our ceiling at 10th place, likely finish dead last again. bad team gets rookie GM, awful minor league coach, adds average GK and not much else. if the coach has magical powers and the keeper helps, 10th. if this plays out how it looks, last or close to it. we won't catch the LA teams much less the red line. it'll be intramurals with the texas teams and SJ. so, yeah, not happy yet. after several years of this and several months into his ownership tenure i am disinterested in business stories. "I'll have your money in a couple months," the gambler tells me. where's my resources???
i think a lot of the difference in terms of fan urgency exemplified here is i think this literally right now is when things change -- the transfer windows and offseason -- and we're effed if we leave camp undermanned -- like in a hole we will never climb out of -- while the optimists think i am prejudging and are all, let them start playing games. my response would be i trust my horse sense more than cubs optimism. the last year i thought we had a chance was 2017. the games you want me to wait for usually play out the way the roster suggests. to be clear, it's not even that i want it to happen, it's just reality. for example, i went to opening day 2 years ago. i want to win. i got a tie. that turned out to be a popular ramos scoreline. my strike threat is i may not be an optimist but it gets depressing to show up when the team is so bad it no longer feels like we could win any given week. or that you're signing up to watch a team win 5-6 of 34 and not really try at all. i can root for a team that tries and it doesn't work. not trying on their end at all feels like not upholding their side of the deal. i wish championships again but the bare minimum is act like we're trying for 7th place and the playoffs. this is pitiful.