Couldn’t agree more, with every single word. The most damning things of all, to me, was 1. watching some of our players loaf at various points throughout the season(saw it in the first game against TCU, we saw it against UCF, we saw it against Clemson, then we saw it against Wake Forest and NC State) and 2. the stunning lack of discipline. Of all of the things that I expected we would or would not see out of a Bill Belichick coached team, it never even remotely once crossed my mind in the preseason that we would ever have to worry about effort, or that we would ever see a complete abandonment of basic fundamentals (we had drives with multiple substitution infractions) and maintaining composure (the drive killing or drive extending personal fouls).
You could’ve told me before the season that we were going to run a bland, boring, unimaginative, uncreative, risk-averse ball control offense and I would have believed it in a split second knowing what kind of philosophy Belichick has. You could’ve never in 1 million years told me that we were going to be routinely out-efforted, out-competed, or out-disciplined.
To me, you can fix style of play in terms of offensive scheming and play calling, a hell of a lot easier than you can fix the very clear cultural problem that we have with effort and discipline.