Rams cut Ray Ray Armstrong

The right move.

he won’t be missed.

Interesting. They gave up
on RayRay.

w
v

Hopefully this gets everyone’s attention.

rfl wrote:

Agamemnon wrote:I don’t mind cutting Armstrong. I do think it is a failure that his situation got to the point that it did.

Indeed.

Finally, a firm move to send the message that discipline is important. Finally. And almost certainly too late.

The move is a good thing. The lateness of the move after last year and half of this one is damning of a coaching staff only reluctantly and inadequately dealing with the team’s problems.

Somewhere in the middle of being a Players Coach or a Disciplinarian ala Coughlin, is the perfect mix of good control and team harmony. Maybe too fine a line for some coaches… ??

NERam wrote:

Somewhere in the middle of being a Players Coach or a Disciplinarian ala Coughlin, is the perfect mix of good control and team harmony. Maybe too fine a line for some coaches… ??

You make a good point–good coaching indeed requires a very tricky balance between the two factors. Absolutely.

And although I have grown very critical of Fisher, it is not a case of applying an ideal set of requirements to him. He has been a successful coach in this league. His Year 1 with us was very good. I can’t rule out the possibility that he could come good with us. He probably will get a Year 4, and it could work out.

I keep trying to do is to establish a clear eyed look at RIGHT NOW. What is Fisher and his coaching staff doing RIGHT NOW with THIS Ram team?

And he is, IMO, quite manifestly FAILING. This pre-season and 1st 4 games have constituted FAILURE to produce competitive football. That’s just fact. You do not win more than a handful of games in a year played like this.

Is the year over? No. It is just barely possible for the team to turn around and approach, say, 9 wins. The odds are very low, but it could happen. I believe Fisher once turned around a TENN team late in the season.

But the situation is a like a student who has failed the 1st semester and the first few exams of the 2nd while showing some patchy success along the way. Final failure is extremely likely, though there are some chances to succeed. But what would have to happen for success?

Well, things would have to change significantly. Our student would have to change study habits or test taking strategies, get help for a learning Disability … some damn thing. Continuing to do what has been done will lead to continued failure.

And, even if things do turn around, there is a price to be paid for failing so much early. Suppose you fail 3 of the 1st 4 exams in a course with 16 tests. Turn it around, and you might pass the course. But those early Fs are a real drag on final possibilities. Most likely, the best such a student could earn would be be a C+ or B-. Only with truly remarkable, miraculous improvement could a student start nailing A after A and gain a really high grade.

And that’s what drives me rather nutty about the passivity of my friends on this board. This is ALMOST CERTAINLY another lost year. We face a murderous stretch of games, much tougher than our 1st 4. We couldn’t properly compete in them and start out 1-3. What has to happen for us to improve so much that we can start beating much better teams that compete at a level higher than what we have seen? How do we get to .500 before the season is simply over? And people STILL say that improvement is what counts and there’s still time …

I cannot state for certain that this season is over. But what we have shown on the field is not good enough to beat mediocre teams, let alone win the stretch coming up.

And that is Fisher’s failure. He chose most of the players and he “prepared” them for the season and spent the bye week trying to re-prepare them. And this is where we are.

Why? How did he fail? It’s not because he is a “bad coach” in general. I am absolutely not saying that. I am not asking him to be an ideal balance.

I am simply saying that, right now, he is failing with this group of players. And the cutting of Ray Ray proves that. He recruited Ray Ray (UDFA?). kept him on the teams, trained him for 2 pre-seasons … and now he cut him because the guy didn’t learn discipline. That is symptomatic of the systemic failure of the team to find discipline and competitive edge. They simply have not done this. The coaching staff is failing. Hell, even Boudreaux is failing to get the OL functioning. Doesn’t make Bou a bad coach. But right now, he is failing because his unit, apparently well stocked with talent, is failing.

This team will not win games until things change. I can’t tell you what changes it needs. I’m a fan. But the team’s record and performance indicate that things are not right.

Fisher has to take that seriously. He needs to stop saying all is well because we are improving. He needs to change the team’s mindset, if not its personnel.

Ray Ray may be the start of real changes. Let’s hope so. But if it’s one cut of a grunt player to just send a message and all goes back to normal … we’ll be lucky to win 4 games this year.

Well, we can always hope for a good draft. Draftniks, are you guys gearing up yet?

Interestingly, they replaced Ray.x.2 with a vet special teamer who was with the Saints when Wms. was. “Vet,” I think, being the key term.