From The Athletic (subscriber's only) this morning by Dan Duggan
In a nutshell: Schoen tried to turn the team around too fast. Instead of slowly building the team and coaching up current players, he took a few too many swings for the fences in order to shorten the timeline, i.e., trading for Waller (a known oft-injury prone player), paying Saquon, and grasping at Parris Campbell in hopes of getting new offensive weapons in the arsenal "now", and in order to get players quicker, he went against his belief and started to restructure contracts to free up money, opposite his own belief. From the article: "Schoen frequently described restructures as a 'last resort' during his first offseason, but they became common practice..." Pushing the cap down the road was always viewed by Schoen as "break glass in case of emergency", but he did it anyway. A lot of it was driven by his successful first season causing a false sense of success, and then he went against his own premonitions and strayed from the lesson he preached about the virtue of "patience"
Duggan does praise Schoen for getting Okereke and locking up Dex...for which I concur
In a nutshell: Schoen tried to turn the team around too fast. Instead of slowly building the team and coaching up current players, he took a few too many swings for the fences in order to shorten the timeline, i.e., trading for Waller (a known oft-injury prone player), paying Saquon, and grasping at Parris Campbell in hopes of getting new offensive weapons in the arsenal "now", and in order to get players quicker, he went against his belief and started to restructure contracts to free up money, opposite his own belief. From the article: "Schoen frequently described restructures as a 'last resort' during his first offseason, but they became common practice..." Pushing the cap down the road was always viewed by Schoen as "break glass in case of emergency", but he did it anyway. A lot of it was driven by his successful first season causing a false sense of success, and then he went against his own premonitions and strayed from the lesson he preached about the virtue of "patience"
Duggan does praise Schoen for getting Okereke and locking up Dex...for which I concur