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On Monday, the Los Angeles Rams fired Jeff Fisher as head coach.
Today, FOX released the first major interview with Fisher as held by Charissa Thompson:
What’s striking to me isn’t that Jeff Fisher recognizes that losing football ultimately doomed him. That in and of itself isn’t even true as Rams VP/COO Kevin Demoff suggested that had the Rams been on track for more #7and9bullshit or even the pre-Rams Fisherball-associated record of 8-8, that Fisher might not have been fired.
Instead what’s surprising to me is that Fisher’s entire approach to success is predicated on a lack of transparency, on obfuscating what the team is doing, on exploiting the media and the fans to create a false reality and then sell that false reality as the model for success.
Consider this quote from Fisher in the interview:
In this day and age, the successful teams in the National Football League are tight-knit. They work together, and they stay quiet. They don’t leak things, and that was a frustration of mine.
(a) I’m not sure what qualifies Jeff Fisher to identify what it is that makes successful teams in the NFL given that his last winning season was 2008 and he’s coached nearly seven seasons since.
(b) I was floored, honestly, that Fisher’s penchance for lying and misdirecting the media took precedence over the football. It’s not that successful teams don’t leak things. It’s that they don’t have stupid shit to leak.
(c) The idea that his contract extension was something that needed to be swept under the rug not only shows how pathetic Fisher’s approach to running his football team is, but how sadly enabled he was by the Rams. They should have had the conviction to announce the extension when it happened. That they didn’t shows how uncommitted the organization is to its own operations.
There’s plenty more in the interview on the Eric Dickerson flap, on Jared Goff, on the league’s worst offense and more.
But I just can’t help but leave his remarks with anything but disdain. Jeff Fisher was so focused on covering up what his team was doing, he never got the team to a place that he wouldn’t need to cover anything up.
And the same forces in power that allowed him to do that are still roaming the halls at Rams HQ.
That’s not an enjoyable thought to hold even now beyond the end of the Jeff Fisher era with the Rams.