My current (surely debatable) view is that one path towards dominance is a dominating QB. If you have one of those, you should be doing very well. My view is we do have that QB in Rivers but not getting the kind of results we would expect.

To compare PR's success under Turner, I compiled the list of recent HC/QB combinations that are/were successful and compared against what PR has done under Turner (excludes current season):

I do think we have a rare asset that is not being well utilized. These metrics do not include this year, and when they do, it will get worse. All of these guys who are active will be in playoffs again, most likely all with first round bye and most likely 1 or 2 of them will be in the Superbowl. After this season, it will be 5 seasons under Turner, with 2 missed playoffs, and almost a third missed. The PO record is OK but bad when you consider the lack of Superbowl participation. The SB participation could be an artifact of a small sample but the team seems to be getting worse rather than better.

I post this because a lot of the "defense" (in quotes, because it is not a full defense, but random statements) of Turner is "well, it worse before" or "the offense was pretty good during his tenure". OK, both true, but you have a rare asset, are you using him well or squandering it? I am saying we are squandering it.

Yes, in individual seasons or games we can blame injuries, strange miscues, special teams coverage, Kaeding's kicking, contract disputes, etc, but I am not buying it.

And if you think this group is an unfair comparison, and PR is more like a Roethlisberger, E. Manning, Ryan, Cutler, Flacco, etc (solid, tier II QB) then the attention focuses on Smith. He had Brees but chose to use a #1 pick on a lesser QB. Yes, hindsight, etc, but that is part of the job to make such key assessments correctly.

But my take is that this is more on Turner than Smith but they seem to be working very closely together, so perhaps hard to extricate one of their influence vs. the other's impact. So, Rivers/Turner has not been that bad and very good compared to most NFL franchises, but not as good as the peer group would suggest. And, much more damning, is it is moving in the wrong direction.

11-5, 8-8, 13-3, 9-7, 8-8 (hopefully) is not domination or sustained success, especially considering the division. One very good season, one solid and three mediocre ones does not cut it with PR as your QB.

Legend:

Manning/Dungy, Rodgers/McCarthy, Brady/Belichick, Brees/Payton.

Most of the columns are intuitive, but a few that are not:

POW: Playoff Win (PO), POL: PO loss, SBA: Superbowl appearance, SBW: SB win. The averages are for each season. They don't always add up to 16 because of QB injuries during the season.