Matthews deserves criticism as well, but it was a questionable move from the start to bring in a big money receiver who can’t play inside when we have one of the better guys at that position already with Adams. I like Matthews fine but he hardly has a massive history of great success as a bonafide number one. His best CFL season was eight years ago.
But even if Matthews sucks all year, this team can still succeed. If Nichols plays like this in the playoffs, the team is completely screwed. I’m not even saying there’s a surefire better option, but would we not feel infinitely better about things had we seen Streveler worked into more sets either when Nichols was struggling or in blowouts? Or maybe had Streveler played more last season when Nichols was very clearly rushed back from injury? It’s a QB management failure on multiple levels but it all comes down to the same ultimate conclusion: Nichols will have a number of good games and some great games every season, but overall he’s not going to get any better than he is now. I don’t expect it to happen because of how risk averse O’Shea seems to be but the glimmer of hope that I have is that he realizes fairly early in Willy’s final season that he wasn’t good enough so a move was made to replace him. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a respectable attempt.