Grading Pep Guardiola on Bayern Munich's 2014/15 Bundesliga season

With the 2014-15 season having reached its conclusion, Bayern Munich can reflect on their performance and make plans for the upcoming campaign.

The German giants had a rather volatile season that looks to be quite successful overall on paper. Bayern claimed the Bundesliga title by a comfortable, 10-point margin and reached the semifinals of both the Champions League and DFB-Pokal.

Bayern's haul of major trophies this May was one fewer than the previous spring, when they won the domestic double. And it was two fewer than in 2013, when they claimed the first and only treble in the club's history. Yet they managed to secure their results this season amid a blight of injuries to such key players as Franck Ribery, Arjen Robben, David Alaba, Thiago, Bastian Schweinsteiger and Javi Martinez.

Separate from club performance, though, is the work of trainer Pep Guardiola. The ex-Barcelona coach is a very divisive figure and only became more so in recent months. Karl-Heinz Rummenigge has put his full support behind the trainer time and again, recently denouncing a supposed "anti-Guardiola" trend, per Suddeutsche Zeitung (h/t Goal) and reiterating his hope that the two-time Champions League-winning coach will extend his contract with the German giants.

The Bayern players are also generally very keen on Guardiola. Not only do they typically wax lyrical about the coach in interviews and press conferences, but one can see in their performance that they are willing to fight for their coach. When they were up against the ropes in the Champions League, as they took on Porto and Barcelona, they gave every last bit of effort they could and turned out winners.

There is no doubting the commitment of Bayern's directors and players to Guardiola. Exactly how deserved his reputation is, however, may be questioned. Given what he did and did not have at his disposal, Guardiola's performance as coach this season was questionable at best.

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Updated table of the matches between the top 6 (Those who qualified to Europe) in Bundesliga. Bayern drops to last. pic.twitter.com/3iQwJcuugf

— Nabil Kenan (@NabilKenan_FCB) May 25, 2015"

The first thing to understand when reviewing Bayern's season is that despite in many cases lacking one, two or more of their superstars, it was the remaining superstars who often made the difference. Bayern were heavily reliant upon Robben, and his class was usually enough to terrify opponents and batter the domestic competition. He finished the campaign with 17 goals and seven assists in 21 appearances and surely would have been the league's top scorer had he not been injured for the last two months.

When the going became tough for Bayern, and individualism was probably not enough to win, they struggled. This is the area where a great coach can make a big difference, hiding a team's weaknesses and making the team better than the sum of its parts.

Even in the Bundesliga, in which Bayern's 79 points marked one of the best seasons ever recorded, they struggled against elite opposition. Their head-to-head record against their five biggest challengers was the worst among top-six finishers: Just 12 points from 10 games. Even Augsburg managed 14, and their squad was miles behind Bayern's in terms of quality—even when considering injuries.

When the players are good enough but the results are not, the blame should usually go to the coach. Wolfsburg hammered Bayern 4-1 in January (analysis here), which was both a case of tactical suicide and of the eventual champions not being mentally prepared following the winter break.

Kevin De Bruyne was hungry and tore apart the Bayern defense, the existence of which was debatable. The Belgian's goal to make it 3-0, for example, came with Bayern's entire back four having ventured about 10 yards into their attacking half.

There were some Bundesliga games in which Guardiola used only one natural center-back and two full-backs as his defense, earning positive results. But against quality opposition, that tactic was exposed again and again, even in domestic play.

In the Pokal, Bayern strolled to the quarter-final. But when faced with a strong Leverkusen side that had nearly knocked Atletico Madrid out of the Champions League, they were forced to test their luck in a penalty shootout after 120 scoreless minutes.

A similar situation arose in the semifinal, which finished 1-1 after extra time, and some very poor penalty-kick taking saw the two-time defending champions crash out of the Pokal. Guardiola's tactics weren't particularly suspect in either match, but Bayern's failure to convince with a vastly superior squad in both cases should raise an eyebrow. There was a very consistent trend in their performances in big games, especially after the winter break.

The Champions League was always going to be Bayern's most important test, especially after last year's debacle against Real Madrid. In the end, Die Roten managed a similar result to the previous season, reaching the semifinal before being comprehensively beaten by Spanish opposition. There is much to be said about the Barcelona clash, but first, there is a trend to observe.

Away to Shakhtar Donetsk, Bayern only managed to create one half-chance in the entire game because of tactics that one could easily predict would struggle. Bastian Schweinsteiger and Xabi Alonso were too slow in midfield and were booked a combined three times, the latter being sent off as he upended Taison, who had broken free. Up front, the absence of a center-forward was felt as Bayern were completely unable to penetrate the Shakhtar defense.

In the quarterfinals against Porto, Guardiola sent out his men in probably the best shape possible, but they made fools of themselves in the first leg. It was 2-0 within the opening minutes, as a few individual errors saw Bayern collapse. They rebounded emphatically in the second leg, but it was a reminder: Guardiola teams rarely succeed away from home in the Champions League knockout rounds. In his career, he's won just four of 17 (23.5 percent) such games.

When it came to the semifinal against Barca, Bayern finally faced a truly great team. Whereas playing too conservatively against Shakhtar and making costly individual mistakes against Porto had been acceptable in previous rounds, Bayern knew they could not put a foot wrong against Barca. And they had far from their best squad available.

The 3-0 first-leg defeat that ensued was a humbling experience for Guardiola and Bayern, and many immediately apologized for the trainer, noting all the injured players that had been missing. Yet it would be a mistake to chalk up the result to injuries alone. Had Bayern truly put their best foot forward, given their best effort and lost 3-0, they could have blamed the lack of available players. But Guardiola played with downright suicidal tactics, and Bayern were put to the sword in the Champions League for a second consecutive year.

There are many detailed analyses of Guardiola's tactical errors, from this author, to esteemed writer Matt Whitehouse, to Bundesliga pundit Raphael Honigstein and more. The most common criticism is that Guardiola, fully aware of his dismal record away from home in the Champions League, approached the first leg desperate to score an away goal from the very first minute.

He took on the world's most deadly front three of Lionel Messi, Luis Suarez and Neymar not with an organized support system but three defenders man-marking for the first 20 minutes. Bayern played an insanely high back line throughout the match and had Manuel Neuer to thank for the score not being 3-0 by half-time.

Barca only got their goals late on, but they should have scored beforehand and managed to exploit Bayern's propensity to play the ball quickly forward, as well as their lack of defensive discipline—both symptoms of Guardiola's coaching—when they took their goals. The tie was over after 90 minutes, and certainly done and dusted half an hour into the second leg, by which time Barca had two away goals and a 5-1 aggregate lead.

A more pragmatic approach at Camp Nou may have served Bayern well. Instead, Guardiola's game plan didn't give them a chance.

The argument is often made in Guardiola's defense that it's unfair to judge the coach on one or two Champions League games, but this season, it wasn't just one bad result at Camp Nou. Bayern underperformed again and again in big fixtures—admittedly with some outstanding rebounds such as the return legs against Shakhtar and Porto—and often with coaching as a major factor, either down to tactics or a seemingly unfocused or sluggish team.

The injury factor is also used to defend Guardiola, but he always had a squad built of mostly world-class players. Others at Bayern and elsewhere have managed to exceed expectations with much less. Louis van Gaal hid Bayern's lack of a true, quality center-forward in 2010 when he played Ivica Olic as a striker, and the Croatia international had the best season of his career. And for all their faults, Jurgen Klopp and Roberto Di Matteo managed to beat Real Madrid with shockingly limited resources last spring and this respectively.

If Guardiola were given a grade for this season, a B- would be just about appropriate. The Bundesliga was not a given, true, and he should receive credit for coaching his side to the title. But even if Bayern as a team deserve a somewhat better grade for their season overall, Guardiola's destructive decisions and inability to get the most out of them in many key matches should see him lose credit.

Prior to Guardiola's appointment, Bayern were indisputably one of Europe's top two or three clubs. They had reached three Champions League finals in four years, and it was beginning to become an expectation that they would reach the final. Right or wrong, that certainly is no longer the case.

After two resounding semifinal disappointments, Guardiola will have to show a little less hubris in his stubborn dedication to his ideals as a coach and a little more pragmatism. If not necessarily in his exact way, it has to be an acceptable option to win. Otherwise, it could be another decent but ultimately disappointing year for Guardiola and Bayern fans.

@Mr_Bundesliga