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One of the numerous suggested reasons for Sam Bradford's apparent decline between 2010 and 2011 was a strange decision the St. Louis Rams made in the course of switching from Pat Shurmur's conservative offense to Josh McDaniels's wild one—they didn't hire a quarterbacks coach, leaving their second-year starter to learn the offense and everything that came with it on his own. According to a Fox Sports report by Alex Marvez, the Rams will hand the job to Rutgers offensive coordinator Frank Cignetti.
It won't be Cignetti's first pro job—he served as the Saints' quarterbacks coach in 2000 and held the same position with the 49ers—where he mentored another number-one overall quarterback, Alex Smith—in 2007.
As Turf Show Times notes, we still don't know why the Rams neglected to hire a quarterbacks coach in the first place, but with Bradford struggling to learn a new offense in the slim time afforded him by the lockout and the wide receiving corps collapsing around him, it mustn't have gone exactly as they'd anticipated when they did it.