Fire Jeff Fisher Campaign

Let’s start this off with some names and records. After five winning seasons, Mike Smith, head coach for the Atlanta Falcons, recorded a 4-12 season followed by a 6-10 season. Fired. Chip Kelly coached the Philadelphia Eagles to back to back 10-6 records in his first two seasons.

Kelly didn’t make it to the end of his third season with the Eagles, after a 6-9 record. Fired. Rex Ryan led the Jets to two winning seasons, two seasons of .500 football, and two losing seasons. His final season in New York saw the Jets finish the season 4-12. Fired.  

Four and a half seasons of work. 30 wins, 41 loses, 1 tie. For those of you who may struggle with math or refuse to partake in subtraction problems, that is 11 games under .500. Eleven more loses than wins. A losing record.

Get the point? Playoff appearances during those four and a half years of work: ZERO. No division titles, no wild card spots claimed. These are the numbers that sum up Jeff Fisher’s career with the Rams. Fired; wait no not fired? Still coaching the Rams? In a business that is notorious for a produce or move on mentality, somehow Fisher has found security in a not so secure world.

Why has he found such security? Why, after posting records of 7-8-1, 7-9, 6-10, 7-9, has Fisher lived to see a 2016 season with the Rams? Maybe it is because things would change.

Fisher would not tolerate 7-9 BS. Instead the Rams would come out guns blazing, shooting for the top spot in the wild, wild West. Ummm, not so much. The Rams sit at 3-5. That is some 7-9, if they’re lucky, BS. Keeping Fisher around to see another day, that is some 7-9, correction 6-10, BS.

Maybe Fisher’s career prior to the Rams is a reason to hold onto hope that change is coming. Care to guess the answer to that? My money is on no. Fisher was the head coach of the Tennessee Titans before taking his talents, or lack thereof, to St. Louis. Granted, Fisher did see success while in Tennessee.

An AFC championship and Super Bowl appearance, an appearance that ended with an outstretched Kevin Dyson coming up a yard shy of the game tying touchdown with no time on the clock. Oh, the memories, the glorious memories.

The 13-3 record that led to that Super Bowl season was followed by another 13-3 season. Fisher’s most successful year as a head coach came 17 years ago. Fisher would tally five more playoff appearances after the 1999 season. This all sounds impressive, right? Records of 5-11, 4-12, 6-10, and 7-9, helped bring Fisher’s career back down to reality. Fisher’s years with the Titans displayed unpredictability and inconsistent results.

Fisher holds an overall record of 172-161. Slightly better than .500, .516 to be exact. After 22 years in the business, Fisher’s 172 wins look anemic compared to Bill Belichick’s 230 over the same 22-year span. Now Belichick is a hall of fame coach and comparing Fisher to him might be unfair.

We’ll keep it in the ramily and compare Fisher to Chuck Knox, the last head coach of the Los Angeles Rams. Knox coached 22 seasons and managed 186 wins. Fourteen more wins isn’t super impressive, but it looks a whole lot better when Knox also had fourteen less losses.

I’ll stop beating around the bush and get to the point of this paragraph. Fisher ranks third in all time loses by an NFL head coach. The coaches ahead of him are Tom Landry, 162 loses, and Dan Shula, 165 loses. Landry reached 162 loses over a span of 29 years, again for you math haters, that is 7 more years than Fisher. While Landry took 23 seasons to reach his 165 loses, 1 more than Fisher. What does this all mean? Fisher will make it to the top of the list in the quickest amount of time. Not a very impressive stat for our head coach of the Los Angeles Rams.

If you need to get a peek behind the records, then I shall I proceed, just like Fisher proceeds to lose. I will make this short and sweet to keep the negativity to a minimum.

The first glaring problem that plagues the Rams is the amount of penalties and lack of discipline. The Rams rank 29^th in penalty yardage per game this season with 73.4 yards. Last season, the Rams averaged 66.1 yards per game, good for 25^th overall. In 2014 the Rams finished dead last. 2013, 29^th.

In Fisher’s first season with the Rams, 2012, the Rams finished 30^th.  Well maybe the players are to blame. Wrong. The Titans in 2010, with Fisher at the helm, finished 30^th in penalty yards per game. The last time a team coached by Fisher ranked higher than 20^th was 2006, when the Titans finished 14^th. That is 10 years of coaching that has seen Fisher-led teams finish in the bottom half of the league in penalty yardage per game. This is not how you manage discipline; this is not how you win football games.

Again, to save you from mass amounts of negativity, I will refrain from highlighting poor calls from previous years, and only focus on bad calls from this season.

The first terrible call, that will forever baffle me, came against the Buffalo Bills. The Rams were on their own 23-yard line, down by 4. Facing a 4^th and 5 with 3:47 left and three timeouts. The obvious, and smart call, would be to punt it away and rely on a stout defense that had seen success throughout the day. Instead, Fisher in all his brilliance, elected to go for it via a fake punt. Needless to say, the fake punt failed. The Bills took over and sealed the game with a quick touchdown.

The very next week, the Rams were locked in a tight battle with the Detroit Lions. With the first half about to expire, the Rams had the ball on the Detroit one-yard line. The Rams had just traveled 80 yards in 10 plays, executing a perfect drive to end the second quarter.

The Rams had an opportunity to get points on the board and go into half with a 17-14 lead. The Rams would then receive the kick off to start the second half. Instead of getting the points, Fisher decided to go for it. Now some may agree with the aggressive play call, and argue that an NFL team should be able to find pay dirt in this situation. Sure, I’ll listen to your argument.

What one cannot argue however, is the play call for that moment. A handoff that goes right up the middle, right into traffic, right into the thick of the 300+lb. linemen. The run was stuffed and the score remained 14-14. The final score, 31-28. The Rams lost by three, three points that could have been secured with a chip shot field goal at the end of the first half.

Fisher has also proven to be incompetent with challenging plays this season. Obvious right calls have been upheld, leading to the loss of valuable timeouts. Two such instances occurred against Arizona in the second half. Both challenges were in regards to incomplete passes for the Rams. Both passes were clearly incomplete, with multiple replays supporting the call on the field. Yet Fisher let the red flag and the team’s timeouts fly away.

The fire Fisher campaign will wrap up with the question that is on everybody’s mind…why isn’t Jared Goff getting the starting nod? Please, somebody, anybody, fire Fisher and help us climb out of the mediocre hole dug nice and deep by Fisher himself.