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To me this started when he played Big Ben in the playoffs last year. He had a choice to make the unpopular call of playing the back-up but giving his team a chance or Big Ben and choosing to likely go down with the ship and the vet. I knew Mike would take the easy way out in order to ride and die with his vet, but it was a mistake, because there were 50+ other guys on that team that were hungry to advance. I penciled Ben turning over the ball there with 99% certainty and he did. Any back up would have performed better than Ben last year as banged up as he was and that was evident in the couple of games prior to that. I think Mike lost some respect with the team when he didn't make the hard decision, as hard as it may have been. He placed it on Ben rather than his own shoulders. With guys like Ben and Farve you gotta be responsible as a coach and tell them to sit out, when they are that banged up, because these guys are always going to want to play even when they can't perform well enough to win. But he didn't want to take the heat if they would have lost starting the #2 QB over Big Ben.
Mike's become too much of a players' coach even though he acts hard and I think this is the result of all that. Not good to let your franchise QB get banged up like that and then let the banged up QB run the team. Then we had the episode where Ben felt he needed to be given answers when his OC was replaced.
I can easily see this unraveling this year.
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