Brad Childress OUT: About Time!

I have no disdain for Brad Childress as a person. I don’t know him, never talked to him, and I’ve never talked about him in that regards. He probably hosts a nice Thanks Giving dinner, enjoys long walks on the beach and good movies, just like you and me. He might even think South Park is intelligent humor, who knows? But to be a head coach of an NFL Football team is not about how you are as a person, but how people respond to you. For Brad, that’s never been his strong suit, and in the end that got him.

Childress has always dealt with players poorly. The Vikings have often under-achieved. Talent under-achieving is a tale-tell sign that a coach struggles to get the best out of his players, obviously. It’s leadership that garners respect. It was only last season, when the Vikings rallied around a wily old veteran, that the team finally played up to their potential.  But even then, there were signs that Brad had a hard time handling people. Despite his knowledge of NFL Offenses, his ability to pick talented players, and how hard he tried to come across as a players coach when wooing Brett into Viking purple, I knew there were problems with Childress when he tried to rip Brett from a game because Favre wasn’t performing up to his liking. Brett had been tossing a perfect season, as far as anybody could hope or tell, and Chilly still thought it was best to give someone else a shot. If a coach only respects his players when they’re winning, it’s really not respect at all.

No matter how smart Childress is (and he does seem to represent some evil genius in that square skull of his), no matter how moist his turkey this Thursday, and how creamy his mashed potatoes are, there was never an example present that showed he was apt in the old people-relations category, a very underrated aspect of being a head coach. Whether it was benching Tarvaris Jackson or “dumbing down” the offense for him (which is always a recipe for failure), never giving Sage Rosenfels a chance, sparring with Percy Harvin (one of the teams’ toughest players), or struggling with Adrian Peterson and his fumblitas – the fact that Childress didn’t instill confidence in the men out their fighting for him was obvious.

A leader accepts fault. A leader works hard to relate to the different personalities on a team – and he makes decisions based on those personalities, always with the team’s best interest in mind. There is no doubt in my mind that Chilly always had the Vikings best interests in tow, but all of that doesn’t matter unless you have the people-skills to lead and direct and garner respect. Childress was always quick to blame, regardless if it was an in-game situation, or a more calculated response to a question in the media. Thought out, or on the fly, Chilly was right there to give a karate kid kick to the ribs when given the chance. But isn’t that often how evil genius goes about its business?

If a player can’t trust his coach, that player has a tough time giving it his all – no matter what a player says about it. That can be cloaked if things happen to fall into place, if a strong and respected player takes on the head-leadership role. If close games become wins, and that egg-shaped ball bounces your way, that lack of people skills can be cloaked.  But when it gets down to then nitty-gritty, and it’s time to make that big decision – Childress’s teams get off the pot.

A head coach doesn’t need to be an X’s and O’s genius. He doesn’t need to have a background as a great player or a history of winning Championships. A head coach needs to find a way to make his players play better than they are. Childress can’t do that, and that’s why his Vikings failed this year. That’s why he needed to be fired, four or five games ago.

It may have taken Randy Moss speaking out to get everybody questioning Brad Childress, but inside that organization, it had to be known where the team stood on their head coach. No matter how much people get paid to do something, if they can’t get behind their boss and his decisions, it’s damn near impossible for them to be consistently productive. The season might be impossible to fix, but at least they finally got this one right.