For everyone suggesting that we bring in an OC and bring in someone else to coach the QBs, I don’t think the numbers work out very well for that. We’re only allowed a certain number of coaches on the staff. We fired 3: Patenaude, Burton, and Popovich. That means we can only add 3 to the staff.
If we assume that we won’t have a coach dedicated solely to special teams and that Thacker will coach linebackers, these are the openings we need to fill with 3 new people: offensive coordinator, defensive coordinator, QB coach, Safeties coach, Cornerback coach.
That’s 5 jobs for 3 people. We can reduce that to 4 jobs for 3 people if we combine safeties and corners into one job (which we’ll call DBs).
If we want to hire both an OC and a separate QB coach, that’s 2 of our 3 spots used up. Here are the only ways I can imagine us making that work, and I don’t really like any of them:
-Collins doubles as Head Coach and DC, and we hire a new DBs coach
-Thacker moves to coaching the DBs, Larry Knight switches to LBs, Marco Coleman takes sole responsibility of the DL, and we hire a new DC
-We hire a new DC who also serves as the DBs coach
I think Collins was a good DC, but he doesn’t have the bandwidth to be adding to his responsibilities right now. I have to believe that if we were planning on giving anyone else the boot, we’d have already done so (though that doesn’t mean it won’t happen once we have new coordinators). But until we hear otherwise, we should probably assume that our new OC will also be coaching the QBs.