Keeping Castillo the Right Call

I may be biased because I agree with you, but well done nevertheless.

and I am pretty okay with Castillo doing an “okay” job on defense.

We have to show spark on offense if we are going to get serious post season looks. That’s on the play of the qb and ball handlers.

You want to point to the reason we sucked? Check out how many times we turned the ball over on offense…

Then tell me the defense hosed our season…
Really?

The offense needs to step it up.
Also this is going to get flamed so hard

this post I am sure will have quite the impact. That being said, I agree with the continuity that is needed in any successful franchise. The results for next year will be the deciding factor of whther or not the Castillo hiring was the correct call.

Milroy, I agree with you, the turnovers definitely killed the season for than any other single factor.

Rujasu, it’s not just the last quater of the year stats. the defense just seemed to play faster and harder at the end of the year. It was like, it took them a while to really understand the scheme to the point where it was second nature, and once they did, they could just play, not think. Thats what I think 2012 will look like.

the post that broke the camels back

That he still can’t win a Super Bowl ?

Btw, welcome to BGN.

All over again. We can continue to make excuses. Spagnuolo wasn’t the ONLY defensive minded person out there. Pagano, Fisher, Del Rio, etc.. The only team we legitimately beat with all their starters was, Dallas, the first time. I would respect them more if they admitted Castillo was a mistake, then corrected the mistake. I firmly believe Andrew is ready to ride off into the sunset. In 2013, we will have a new HC, DC, AND OC. Here’s to my 2013 Eagles!!

Castillo showed enough to prove he can coach defense, and he deserves another year at least at DC. I’m glad it’s here, but if he had been fired I strongly believe he would have had a shot elsewhere. The more I learn about the man the more I respect him, and given the microscopic scrutiny he was under, I would say he handles pressure fairly well.

Assuming Vick stays healthy 16 games (hopefully he was serious when he said he’d start taking more care of himself), I imagine another top 10 defense will translate into 11+ wins for 2012, and an NFC East title. As we learned from Green Bay, that doesn’t really mean anything, so here’s hoping they’ll make a deep run, and prove the doubters wrong.

Eagles all the way in 2012!!

What I think our problem was is that we had all these new players and noone was able to step up and take control of the locker room. If you have everyone running loose you get those 4qtr collapses

And not the right call. And like most things at a bar , at 2am , nothing good comes out of this.

Seriously, Andy and Juan are a match made in hell. Andy won’t the ball when he should and Juan can’t stop the run when he needs to.
Next season the team will just become more comfortable with winning three quarters of a game and then walking to the locker room wondering wtf. did we just blow another lead?

Its really getting sad to watch everyone try to rationalize why an 8-8 season after a 10-6 and 11-5 and NFC Championship trip before that it is actually somewhat okay for the majority involved because (like everyone else) there was no off season aside from training camp. This season was a train wreck, and I’m not sold on the whole new scheme, new players, no offseason bullshit excuse. It’s classic political rhetoric for Andy and Lurie to come up and say “I’m not trying to make any excuses but lets not forget we had no offseason and the players and coaching staff took time to come together, just look at the last 4 games.” Regardless of how you look at it somebody is accountable, if you use the new everything/no offseason excuse then it’s Andy and Howie’s fault for allowing him to take over the defense with little experience.
The too many new roster additions argument is a total fallacy. We had barely any change anywhere on the offense except O-line. 7 out of 11 returning starters on defense its not that huge a change. All these free agents yet barely any of them actually contributed all that much majority was returning starters. Juan is the one who wanted to compound the problem of no offseason by throwing all his players into unfamiliar positions. Putting Nnamdi in the slot and at safety and shuffling the linebackers just for the hell of it to start the season and flipping around Nate Allen, Kurt Coleman, and Jarrad Page for no reason.

Seven New Starters:
Seven new starters, that is a legitimate argument on the surface of things. But the problem is that Juan Castillo continuously tried to shove square pegs in round holes. He tried to use Casey Matthews behind the wide nine defensive line, a task he was clearly not prepared for. He moved Moise Fokou to WLB. He moved Jamar Chaney to SLB. He started Jarrad Page. He moved DRC to the nickel back. He played Nnamdi in soft zone coverage, in the slot and as a safety.

I don’t really see how an injury to Michael Vick, the starting QB on offense had any kind of effect on the defense. Did they miss tackles on Marshawn Lynch because Michael Vick was hurt? Did Michael Vick give up all those yards to Tom Brady.

Bad luck is a dumb excuse. Having players blow coverage because they were in bad positions isn’t bad luck, that is bad play calling. Having a soft, rookie middle linebacker missing tackles isn’t bad luck, that’s a bad personnel decision. Etc.

Spags would’ve presumable brought his scheme and adjusted it to fit the wide nine scheme. And we didn’t want because of his scheme, we wanted him because he is a proven defensive coordinator who has shown the ability to field a superbowl caliber defense, adjust on the fly and put players in good positions to succeed. That is more than Juan has shown, surely you must agree with this.

And the last 4 games are deceiving. And that is putting it nicely. I’ve written about it before.

Here is a list of QBs and RBs the Eagles faced the past 3 weeks: Matt Moore/JP Losman, Reggie Bush, Mark Sanchez, Shonn Greene, Stephen McGee and Sammy Morris. In addition to that, it should be noted that the Dolphins were missing Jake Long and Vernon Carey for most of the game.

You can add Rex Grossman, Roy Helu and Evan Royster to that list. Not a very impressive list of opponents, no? Do you know how good our defense was before we faced this list of scrubs? 24th in points allowed, 17th in yards allowed and 25th in yards per play.

And sure, you can give them credit for at least being able to stop scrubs but then I could say “Don’t you think it’s a problem it took Juan Castillo 12 weeks to figure out how effectively call a defense?” It took him weeks before he realized he shouldn’t use the wide nine on every snap. It took him weeks before he found an effective linebacker rotation. It took him weeks to settle on the same safety rotation as last year. It took an Asante Samuel injury for him to play DRC effectively. Next year it’ll just be some other problem that he can’t solve. He has clearly shown an inability to adjust and contour his defense to what the offense is doing and adjust and effectively utilize the personnel he has.

Oh and his playcalling sucked. He let linebackers and safeties consistently get lined up with wide receivers. The height of this issue was when Jaiquawn Jarrett and Brian Rolle were inexplicably charged with covering Larry Fitzgerald at different points in the Cardinals game, both of whom he scored on.

You’ve bought fool’s gold my new friend and that’s not just my opinion, that is an opinion that I share with Jeffrey Lurie and Greg Cosell.

Oh and welcome.

almost ‘will’ the team to win the Super Bowl with our loyalty and positive thoughts, anyone on board ?

Oh yea, Bunk, Gocong, and Clemons are doing quite well

I agree with most of this post. I think people like to discount the shorten offseason and just say its a front office excuse but we added a number of playmakers that had never played with each other and mixed it with an inexperienced coach. Also, if you look at the year as a whole in the games we blew in the fourth quarter the offense was awful as well we cant just blame the D. I think adding Bowles will help immensely as no longer will Nnamdi and DRC be mis-used. Im staying optimistic for the future and I think that firing Juan, while it may have appeased some fans, would have ultimately set us back a few years.

it could work !!!

show some love to 22, he did give us a lots of great plays

I have felt this way over the past few weeks, even when I wanted Spags, in the back of my mind i was okay with this outcome.

No… it wasn’t

It gets their hero Andy off the hook with another year of the built in scapegoat.

Okay, these numbers are from 2000-2010. A full decade of data.

If you were to start every single drive at the 50 yard line, you would have a 45.9% chance of scoring on that drive and approximately 20% of those scores would be field goals. Giving the ball up at midfield and in your own territory is hardly a death sentence for your defense. In fact, the odds of the offense scoring only become greater than 50% when they start at their 45 yard line and greater than 60% at the 36 yard line.

Let me say what I took away from that, Teams score less than 50% of the time when they get the ball at or behind the 50 yard line. The numbers favor the defense. People talk about these turnovers as if we were continuously turning the ball over in plus territory and just handing the opposition points. This is simply untrue. In the 2011 season, the Eagles had a turnover differential of -14 and they turned the ball over a whopping 38 times. But wait… Where did those turnovers happen? I’ll make a graphic to help me illustrate my point.

Only 13 of the Eagles’ turnovers occurred ended up being spotted inside their own 50 yard line. 13 of 38 turnovers.

Source for the field position stuff: NFL Stats Blog

Good Post. I don’t agree with everything, but I see your points.

I don’t buy the Juan excuses. Every team had the same off season and despite our bringing in a lot of new players, its not an excuse. But I don’t buy that he can’t be a good DC, I certainly think one season isn’t enough to grade anyone. Was he over his head? Of course he was. However, in this exact same situation, if this season was named a ‘rebuilding year’ rather than an “all in” year, people would have said, well, he did OK. It wasn’t and we’re sick of the “almosts” and the “next year is our year” and that’s why everyone is so goddamn frustrated. Including myself.

I hope every Juan/Andy hater eats their words this time next year. Not because a single one of them are wrong, but because that means our Eagles managed to pull it together and win a Superbowl.

it also evaporates a lot of playing time. and each turnover increases the probability of further turnovers because you are more likely to be losing and hence more likely to take greater risks to get the lead.

this is why the turnover, as bdawk4ever pointed out, has the highest correlation with losing of any statistical factor in football.

I just don’t really know what to say to this post. I can’t believe so many people are forgetting how bad Castillo was. And it wasn’t just scheme or new players. He constantly had players in the completely wrong positions and made terrible play calls. I can only hope that people are this forgiving if I have a historically bad year at my job.

Some people will disagree with what you said, some will dislike some of it and some will completely agree…. Which leads to discussion.

I fall in the category of dislike some but agree with most.

Expect a counter argument from me in a couple of days :)

I agree that there was improvement. We let quarterbacks just as average as the likes of Moore, Sanchez, etc., come back against us earlier in the year. So there is reason for optimism.

But it should not be blind optimism. We shouldn’t get too excited about it. I want to see a couple of good games against quality QB’s before I am completely convince.

I’m not overly excited about the yardage ranking. Back in the 70’s and 80’s when I was a kid that was a bigger deal but not now. The NFL wants scoring. They want big plays. The rules are biased towards offenses.

Where we were not good was turnover ratio. Only three teams in the playoffs had a negative turnover ratio and none of them made it to a conference championship game. Eagles gave the ball away too much on offense and didn’t take it away enough on defense.

The NFL is now about big plays and turnovers.

I’m not putting blind faith in Castillo but at this point I agree that he should stay for the reasons that you mention. I think that bringing Bowles in will help.

First of all, welcome to BGN, and you’re clearly a gutsy guy to take on a bunch of the fanbase this way.
Let me say I agree with you partway. The Wide 9 and Washburn were not going to get scrapped. That doesn’t make keeping Castillo the right call, it means Andy worked himself into a corner where it became the only call.
Remember Lurie after Week 17 saying some changes were going to have to be made?
Everyone took it to mean that Juan was gone and there would be a new DC.
Instead, Johnnie Lynn was fired and Bowles was brought in.
From the moment Bowles was hired I suspected Castillo was not going anywhere. Because any incoming DC, especially an experienced one, is going to expect to (or want to) have the first word about choosing position coaches on his side of the ball. Start by saying “hey Spags (or whoever), how would you like to come to Philly and be my DC? But you can’t change our DL coach and we have to run the Wide 9, that’s not negotiable” – a lot of potential DC’s are not going to be coming out here in that situation. Add in a new DB’s coach, which means you’re not going to fire him right away either, and a lot less DC’s are going to be coordinating here if they’re handcuffed personnel wise at 2 out of the 3 lines of defense.
So who is left? Either someone unexperienced enough to jump at being offered the job, or somebody who is clearly “Andy’s man”. Juan – sort of fits the bill both ways there.