[MIJB#19]

General Manager Notes: Changes are coming in 2095
But that wasn't planned...

Every off-season in the IHOF starts with the day where the teams decide on how to shape their coaching staff. The plan and hope was to find a different kind of defensive coordinator, but the actual change came unexpectedly. The Harlem Apollos were looking for a new head coach after theirs retired and they decided to sign our offensive coordinator Willie Behrendt. Quite a pity, it would have been nice to keep building on his smashmouth approach to football. Alas, it wasn't to be.

To fill the void at offensive coordinator, we hired Alexander Petty, a West Coast fan. Quite the disaster is his complete inability to scout players, his strengths are player development (especially with running backs), interviewing and play calling. Okay, so there's that. More over, we didn't hire a new defensive coordinator, which means we're going to be one of the worst teams in terms of scouting players. This lack of scouting skills is unprecedented in Merchantmen team history. Safe to say: we're in for a challenge this off-season.

Part of it how we got here is that we fell to 10th place in the Blackadar Cup, and subsequently in the draft order. Yes, we're still financially a playoff caliber team. Main cause for the drop is our stadium renovation. We'll have to live with that for another off-season or two.

First order of business from this new offensive coordinator: he's telling us Earnest Ashley is a 30/30ish quarterback. That's right, Behrendt had him as a 35/50ish quarterback at the end of last season, but our new OC thinks he's backup material, not starting material. It's going to be quite the challenge to actually ignore our OC on his evaluation of the ability of our players. He's also much less optimistic about our three young offensive linemen C Robbie Zinn (-10ish), LT Isaac Delgado (-15ish) and LT Johnnie Houston (-15ish). Ouch. Not on the players, but on landing this guy that has no clue about how good young players actually are.

So yeah, I'll have to recover a bit from that, I just didn't see that kind of mess coming at all. It's going to drastically change my staff draft preferences in the future, a coordinator like this should have never ever been the best possible candidate for us. That's all besides the point of this OC preferring a different style of football, because that's something we can work around.

Bottom line: the MalcPow challenge, let's call it that. We'll have to go into the draft leaning heavily on combine scores and trends of a player's skills compared to one another, we can by no means rely on our OC, except his excellent interviewing ability...