As to your first question: you are incorrectly presupposing that the game threads provide all the relevant answers and that the coach just ratifies them. In fact, the coaching has two indispensable functions in that process: getting the thread started by laying down the options and making the final calls. Rambo spent entire Monday mornings in the chat with me, wozz and others trying to make final matchup and tactics decisions. Your objection is a bit like saying that since the us president has advisors, there is nothing left for him to decide....
It's not at all like that actually. Our choices are, are we calling anyone up?, are we running LI R&G or Motion?, are we playing M2M, 3-2, or 2-3?, are we playing TIE Normal or CT?. Pretty straight forward and with the people in our community the knowledge is there even if a manager personally doesn't have "experience" he can make tactical decisions with no problem. Starting a thread isn't hard at all... As far as the chats go I'm not discrediting them entirely but if the coach gets the chatter going in the thread a week before I don't understand what last second adjustments would need to be made.
I just want to make sure that there are people in the nt staff whose job it's to attend to the pipeline (we need at least half a dozen)
I will say this again... I agree the staff is great and the way they are set up is great, but, I still feel the coach personally needs to be out in the community and having more contact. I think this is a big reason we don't have a connect between U21 team and national team. They operate as 2 separate entities, and to a point they are, but the NT manager needs to personally be on top of the pipeline along with the staff to keep things moving in the right direction.