Should Greg Roman ask for help?

Yesterday I asked Jim Harbaugh about the percentages of coach involvement in the offensive game planning on a weekly basis, and surprisingly, Harbaugh said it’s primarily a Greg Roman production.

If the 49ers offense has a bad game, that means Roman missed or misread something when analyzing his opponent during his game planning.

Bill Walsh was the sole game planner in his first tenure at Stanford and for the Niners, and when he had an “off week,” the offense was brutal, and he would admit it.

Later, Bill began to modify his thought process and was more open to contributions from his assistants, especially if they had been with him for a while and his “trust” of them grew.

If you were a head coach, would you want a one-man game plan or collaboration?

I would want collaboration. No one coach, even Bill Walsh or Mike Holmgren, has the market cornered on ideas of how to attack a defense or how to best design a play for a matchup against a cornerback.

You cannot see and think of everything all the time, and each coach has a different thought process that needs to be tapped and cultivated.

Secondly, when the other offensive assistant coaches do not contribute to the game plan, you are stifling their creativity as well as motivation for delving deeply into the opponent.

Also, the majority of assistant coaches have come from other teams, and by asking them to assist in game planning and contributing ideas, you are drawing not only on their wealth of ideas but also the ideas that their fellow associates had when they were with other teams. Your circle of knowledge, so to speak, grows geometrically, not arithmetically, not only about attacking a particular defense and its coordinator but also about their personnel, because each team has scouts who write weekly reports on the strengths and weaknesses of each opposing team member.

The position coaches always know best the strengths and weaknesses of the players who they coach and with whom they meet every day. Why not draw on those assets?

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