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Posted on Sat, Aug. 29, 2009 10:15 PM
In retrospect, last year was a disaster and Pioli faces a big challenge
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Everyone knows the Chiefs were a bad, bad football team in 2008. Two wins. It was clearly the worst football team in Chiefs history. But there’s something funny about bad teams — you don’t fully appreciate their awfulness until the season ends and the dust settles. You don’t really get it until you are left trying to clean up the mess.
Sure, it’s true that while watching the Chiefs get shut out by Carolina 34-0, while watching them give up 54 points to a Buffalo team that scored six points total the next two weeks, while watching them blow a 21-3 lead to San Diego, you could sense that they had some issues. But it’s only now — after the regime change, after Scott Pioli and Todd Haley were brought in, after Tony Gonzalez was traded and Dwayne Bowe was locked in the doghouse — that the season comes into focus.
•Did the Chiefs really have only 10 sacks last year?
•Was Tyler Thigpen really the Chiefs’ quarterback?
•Did Larry Johnson really get suspended, then look about twice his actual age, then demand to leave, then get stuck with the Chiefs because nobody really wants him?
•Have the Chiefs really won only one of their last 13 home games? At Arrowhead Stadium — once so proudly called the “toughest stadium in the NFL”? Really?
Yes to all those questions and many, many more — and it’s only when you take a clear-eyed look back at 2008 that you realize just what Chiefs general manager Scott Pioli faces. Sure, the city was bursting with hope when Pioli was hired from New England — and why not? This football section is all about influences — and Pioli was influenced by two of the best football men of the last quarter century, Bill Parcells and Bill Belichick. The guy certainly understands what it takes to win in the NFL.
After a mostly sour 11 years under President/CEO/GM Carl Peterson and four different head coaches, it’s good to have someone with a new approach and a good feel for the game. It’s good to bring in a football guy, someone with new ideas and an idea about what it really takes to win. Out with the old. In with the Pioli.
Then, first thing, Pioli trades a high draft pick and gives a lot of money to another team’s backup quarterback. Yeah. The Chiefs start their new journey by trying to turn someone else’s backup quarterback into their starter. Well, that’s different.
•1993: Chiefs acquire 49ers backup Joe Montana.
•1994: Chiefs acquire 49ers backup Steve Bono.
•1995: Chiefs acquire Washington backup Rich Gannon.
•1997: Chiefs acquire 49ers backup Elvis Grbac.
•2001: Chiefs acquire Rams backup Trent Green.
•2006: Chiefs acquire Patriots backup Damon Huard.
•2009: Chiefs acquire Patriots backup Matt Cassel.
OK, no, so that’s not all that different. But you can’t blame Pioli. All of his off-season moves make it clear that there is another, bigger influence at work here than his past with Parcells and Belichick. And that is: The influence of having an incredibly bad football team. It’s like Pioli walked into Kansas City full of enthusiasm and certainty and even a smattering of arrogance — and then all of a sudden he looked around and realized that nobody on this team can actually play football. That’s a sobering moment.
So, of course, he gave up a second-round pick and offered a ton of money to Cassel, a guy Pioli himself picked in the seventh round, a guy who before last year had not started a single football game since high school. We don’t know — can’t know — if he’s a legitimate NFL quarterback based on the 15 pretty good games he played with an offense that had scored an NFL-record 589 points the year before. But Pioli saw his options in Kansas City and clearly felt like he had to take the chance.
Posted on Sat, Aug. 29, 2009 10:15 PM
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