Herm Edwards 2008 Season Wrap-Up

Dec 29, 2008, 2:49:55 PM

Highlights

HERM EDWARDS: “To finalize our season, it was disappointing for us, our players, our fans and everybody involved in the Chiefs organization due to the fact that the win-loss record wasn’t what we anticipated.

“But I thought there were a lot of bright spots for a team that was in a rebuilding mode. We got a lot accomplished with a young football team. When you look at 10 of our games and two of them you lose by 10 points and then seven of them by seven points or less. I think that is due to the maturity and growth of our players.

“When you look at all the young players that played, it was our intent going into this season that we were going to build it through the draft, build our base with young drafted players and we were able to do that. Basically most of the players we drafted except for Merritt and Barry (Richardson) all played. We had some starters: the two corners and our tackles, one on offense and one on defense, and the rest of the draft picks played a lot. That’s the building block for this football team.

“I thought the development of Tyler Thigpen in playing 11 games helped us. Once he was reinstated in the Jets game I thought we were pretty consistent on offense. You’re talking about a young kid, really a rookie quarterback in my opinion, and he played pretty well.

“There are still pieces missing but that can be corrected in the draft and some in free agency. I thought for the last couple of years we’ve drafted very well. These players have all been starters for the most part when you look at the last two drafts. They will be the future of this football teams. That’s where we’re headed right now as a football team.

“It was a joy to be coaching all these young guys. The energy they brought every week after a lot of hard losses, tough losses, close losses was amazing to see. They kept coming back and that says something about youth. They never made any excuses for our situation and that’s a credit to the coaches and the players. I thought the organization as a whole stuck together. That’s part of the process, too. Something good is going to happen out of all of this. I know that and I think the players know that too.

“Our plans now as a staff are to evaluate our players. We’ll get with Bill (VP of Player Personnel Kuharich) next week and really go into the meetings talking about individual players, how they fared and what we have to do to upgrade certain positions. From there the Senior Bowl is around the corner along with free agency and then we go into the work of trying to develop a football team.”

Q: How or when will you evaluate your assistant coaches?

EDWARDS: “Probably this week once they leave. Again, look for answers right now and see how you can improve as a football team. That’s the kind of process you’ll be in.”

Q: If you decided to make a change are you free to release any coach right now even if you wanted to?

EDWARDS: “I’m not free to do anything right now but evaluate our players. When we find out who the GM is he’ll come in and decide what he wants. We’ll do what football coaches do. We’ll do our job. We’re going to continue to evaluate our players and get ready for the Senior Bowl. Start looking at college players.”

Q: Do you feel at all like you’re in limbo right now?

EDWARDS: “You’re waiting on the GM right now to be hired. They’re going to do a good job of thoroughly interviewing guys as they should do. It’s a big hire and something you can’t take lightly. We all understand that.”

Q: Do you feel uncomfortable about your situation depending upon who they hire?

EDWARDS: “I just think the new guy is going to have the same vision that we started with, this rebuilding vision that we’ve been trying to do as an organization. That’s going to be a key too. He’s going to have to come in and evaluate players and then he’s going to evaluate what we’ve done.”

Q: Have you told your staff they are free to look for another job?

EDWARDS: “No, I told them right now they’ve got a job. Their job is right here as a Kansas City Chiefs football coach. That’s what they’re doing and they’ve done a good of that all year, in my opinion.”

Q: Is that unfair to assistant coaches to wait while other jobs are being filled?

EDWARDS: “When you’re a coach and signed on to be a coach that’s what you do. You coach. That’s how it unfolds and you can’t control it. All you can control is you come in every day and do your job. That’s what these guys have done all year and what they’ll continue to do. They’re professional football coaches.”

Q: You control the hiring and dismissal of assistant coaches right?

EDWARDS: “As far as hiring and letting guys go. I would still have to speak to (interim president) Denny (Thum) because he’s the next guy in charge at this point. I guess it would be he and ownership. Obviously, if a guy gets a chance to be a coordinator you never stop a guy from going.”

Q: Do you think you can make a pretty good case to the next GM that the wheels are in motion and you’re making progress?

EDWARDS: “Maybe it’s my upbringing, but I’m not one to try and build cases. I let my work speak for itself. That’s the bottom line. I’m not big on promoting Herman Edwards, never have been and I’m not going to start now. I’ve been in this business too long and I think I try to do things the right way and try to do things right for this organization and this football team.

“I know it was the right thing to do. That’s all you can do. You do the right things for the right reasons. At this point in time we knew we were going to be in this situation. We all accepted it. That’s where it’s at.”

Q: I know you’ve said you aren’t burnt out. Do you still very much want to be the coach of this team?

EDWARDS: “I’ll tell you what: the Pacific Ocean couldn’t burn me at. I don’t know where all those reports come from. I’ve got a lot of energy. That’s what makes me go. You ask any player. I haven’t lost my energy one bit. That’s not going to happen to me. You don’t have to worry about that.”

Q: You’ve said you don’t read what the media say, but is there a perception that the public might have about you that you would like to correct?

EDWARDS: “No, not at all. I’m not going to defend how I coach. I don’t need to do that. My tenure will tell you how I coach and it’s not on one year, one season or two seasons. It’s accumulative. That speaks for itself.

“The greatest thing you can do as a coach is have the players in the locker room speak about you. Your players do the best job of speaking for their head coach. As long as you coach the players to the best of your ability that’s all you can do.

“There are perceptions of every coach in the National Football League. You can’t get involved in that. You’ve got to know who you are as a man. I know who I am. I know what I stand for and what I believe in. That’s not going to change. Some people will be for me and some people will be against me. That’s fine. People have a right to have an opinion and that’s okay. But I don’t live my life that way. If you do you’re going to live up and down a lot and my life is pretty consistent. My values are my values and the things I believe in are what they are. It doesn’t change.

“I don’t read newspapers. I don’t listen to the talk shows. That’s the truth. And, I don’t lie. I tell people the truth. All I have is my word and that’s all I got. That and my last name and I’m never going to embarrass that. That’s important to me.”

Q: Have you been given any timetable when a decision on GM might be made?

EDWARDS: “No, not at all. I’m not involved in that process. It’s not in my hands.”

Q: Do you feel with a new general manager that although you don’t have to sell yourself, that he will still need to know who you are and about you?

EDWARDS: “I’m pretty sure if it’s a new GM who gets hired he’s going to know who I am unless he’s not in America. I’ve been in this league 30 years. He’s got to make a decision on what he wants to do. He’s got to look at it and say is this guy the right guy and if he’s not that’s okay. I’m okay with that.”

Q: Are you concerned that with the way the game unfolded yesterday that some of the progress you saw might have all been taken away?

EDWARDS: “No, hopefully, he looks at three years, when I got here three years ago. If I’m the GM, that’s what I’m looking at. I’m looking at three years. I’m not looking at the last game or this year or last year. I’m looking at three years and where this team was at and what has transpired in the last three years and where we’re trying to go. That’s if I’m the GM. I’m not the GM, but it’s something I might want to be involved in but not right now.”

Q: Is that something you think you might like to get into, being a GM?

EDWARDS: “You never know. I’ve been trained by a pretty good one.”

Q: As you look back on your decisions of the last three years are there some you wish you had made differently?

EDWARDS: “The decisions you make are based on the information you have at that point in time. You know what I’ve learned about being in this position? It’s always easy for people to make suggestions. Everyone has suggestions. It’s always hard for the person who has to make the decision because once you make the decision that’s it, that’s the final thought. You get billed for it.

“Everyone has suggestions. I hear suggestions every day. ‘You should have done that, you should have done this.’ Everybody can make suggestions. Suggestions are easy to make. It’s the guy who has to make the decision that’s tough and the way you make decisions, in my opinion, is you gather all the information and at that point in time – at that point not a year later or two months later – it’s the right decision you make for the football team.”

Q: Your performance on defense this year was not good.

EDWARDS: “Last year we played pretty good defense. This year it fell off and there are a lot of reasons for that. I’m not going to explain why. There are a lot of reasons for it and I think if the GM wants to know we’ll sit down and show him why and I’ll show him what happened. But I’m not sitting up here and going to debate you on stats. I could throw a bunch of stats out. The process of what we’re trying to do and where we’re trying to go is the most important thing. It’s not what happened in the past. It’s where we’re trying to go.

“Are we going in the right direction? Yes. Do we have a football team that has a chance to win a bunch of games next year? Yep, I believe that and I think the players believe it. That’s the most important thing: that the players believe it. We’ve got to add some more pieces to it. Is it far away? No, it’s not far away at all.”

Q: Looking at the Miami situation this year given its one win season last year. Do you wish you would have gone with more veterans as they seemingly did?

EDWARDS: “No, we needed to do this for this team. Every team is different. If you look at Miami and you look at us we’re different. We went about it a different way. They went to the veteran side of it. We had done that. That’s how we did business for a long time. We went the other way and said we were going to rebuild. That’s what we did and started with a young base of football players. Now, we have a base of 80 to 85% of this football team. The foundation is laid. That’s what you have to look at. Now, you can go into free agency. It’s a lot easier to go forward now. This was a very difficult year and there are a lot of circumstances that made it so. To the credit of the players and coaches, no one made any excuses. I’m not going to stand here today and make any excuses.”

Q: How many players away are you?

EDWARDS: “On defense, I think three, four maybe. On offense probably we need two. Then we’re pretty good, in my opinion, because the rest of the team is going to be back - 80 to 85% of these kids are going to come back. They’re going to have game experience, playing experience. They’ll be much more mature as players.

“I look at Jamaal Charles. His birthday was yesterday. The guy is 22 years old. That’s the kind of team you’ve got. You’ve got a bunch of young kids. The average age is probably 25-point-something. We went from one of the oldest teams to one of the youngest teams. They’ve got to learn how to be a professional football player and that takes time. I know that because I was a professional football player at one time. I know the maturity curve and where you’re supposed to be and how long it takes to be a pro. A lot of these kids were pressed to play a lot. Some of them probably played too much. But at the end of the day the experience they gained is going to help this football team.”

Q: What was your reaction to Larry Johnson’s comments of yesterday saying he was gone from the Chiefs next year?

EDWARDS: “Well, Larry’s under contract. So, until somebody makes that decision he’s a Chief. He’s frustrated but again, you know, he missed four football games and he’s about 100 something yards short of 1,000 yards with a team that threw the ball a lot.

“He’s a talented player and he doesn’t like the way things ended. No one does. He has a right to his opinion but he’s under contract. That’s what he has to understand and I think he understands that.”

Q: Are you satisfied with his efforts and the commitment he brought to practicing?

EDWARDS: “After the suspension, yeah. I thought after those four weeks where he didn’t play. I thought he came back with a great mindset and did everything he could do. The offense had changed and he had to play in an offense that wasn’t conducive of him carrying the ball 30 times. That’s always hard for a guy that’s carried it a lot. So, he had to learn how to do something a little bit different and I thought for the most part he did a pretty good job.”

Q: But that’s different in how you like to play offense. Do you think your commitment to the new spread offense played into the difficulties you had in the second half of games?

EDWARDS: “There again, you put stamps on people like this guy is going to come in and going to just run the ball. I want to win, I want to score points. However you do that you do. We just saw a different way of moving the ball because we had been struggling trying to do it the other way. We had to go to this wide-open attack.

“Tyler struggled some but he should have struggled some. He’s a rookie quarterback. He’s like any rookie quarterback and we put a lot on his shoulders for sure. The running game wasn’t like how we had liked because of the attack we were in. I thought that was the best way for us to be competitive. We became a much more competitive team when we got into that mode. We had a chance to win a lot of those games but we weren’t able to quite get it done. I think you have to be able to adjust to what the team can do well. That’s something we could do pretty well and we stayed with it. Now, whether we stay with it again next year we’ll determine in the off-season. That will be a big determination on the players you draft, on the players you acquire in free agency, and how we’re going to play football on offense.”

Q: Do you think the GM will play into that decision?

EDWARDS: “Hopefully, the new GM is not going to try and coach. That’s not his role, I don’t think. It’s his role to have the same vision and be on the same page as the head coach. I think that’s what GM’s do, at least the ones I’ve been with have done.”

Q: You’ll certainly be evaluating players, but what grade would you give yourself?

EDWARDS: “I would give myself about a ‘C.’”

Q: Why not a ‘B’ or what keeps you from having a ‘B?’

EDWARDS: “Because I don’t really grade myself, so I’ll give myself a ‘C.’ I’ll let you guys to do that. You guys do a good job.”

Q: Right now, is this offense the one you’d like to feature next year?

EDWARDS: “I think a couple of things: you have to have the ability to run the ball in December and January. We struggled in the Red Zone inside the five-yard line. Our inability not to run the ball hurt us. You’ve got to come up with a way to run the football and that’s something you’ve got to look at. If you can do that, you can still stay in this offense. But you’ve got to be able to hard-nose it every once in a while and run the football to take time off the clock when you have a lead in the fourth quarter. I think that’s important.”

Q: Why couldn’t you get the tough yard when you needed it?

EDWARDS: “When you play a wide-open offense like that you don’t run the ball as effectively as you would if you were just constantly running it. The practice time is the practice time. You can only practice so much during the course of the week and you have to decide what you’re going to be. We decided we were going to be a spread offense and run certain runs. That’s what happened to us late in the season. You didn’t have a lot of time to go into that hard-nose running because we were continuing to develop the offense.”

Q: Other than the record, what was the most disappointing part of the season?

EDWARDS: “Probably our inability to finish games when you’ve got seven of them right there where you have a chance. And we didn’t get any luck either. Sometimes you have to be a little lucky and get a bounce to go your way every once in a while. We were in a couple of those tight games, losing two of them to San Diego by one point, and they end up winning our division. You lost some tight games and you thought you would eventually win a couple of those. But that’s something to build on.

“We played a very difficult schedule, the fourth toughest in the league. We were very competitive for the most part. That’s a good sign for a young football team.”

Q: Was the spread offense because of Thigpen’s comfort?

EDWARDS: “I thought the spread really helped our offense a lot because of the different blocking we were doing and how we got rid of the ball because we were in the shotgun more. We have some pretty athletic linemen that can run and block. You saw that at times and that’s what you’ve got to consider if you’re going to stay in this offense, that is, the different kind of linemen you need compared to the power teams.

“We struggled early but later the sack total went down and our ability to move the ball went up and I thought our offensive linemen regained an appreciation for what kind of offense we were running.”

Q: Do you believe your team is a good one to attract free agents?

EDWARDS: “Yes, if you’re a free agent and you look at the direction of this football team and the foundation that has been built here. Ask any player that has played against us and you hear it every Sunday from coaches and players as you leave the field, you guys are close. Players sense that, they know that, they can see it’s going to be a young team they’re going to be together for a long time. They’re going to be saying if they get it turned they’re going to be in it for a while. It’ll be a pretty good spot to be in.”