Monday, January 03, 2011

What's Wrong with Todd Haley?

The Chiefs head football coach, Todd Haley, who in just his second year has turned the team around and made the playoffs, strikes me as a man who has a problem.

  • He's a little odd, a little peculiar, like a man you might suddenly find sitting naked in the parking lot because the pressure got to him.  In fact, in war movies, when a soldier has to be removed from the front lines because he won't snap out of that haunting, menacing, thousand-yard-stare… the actor is channeling the Todd Haley vibe.
  • Other coaches, both on his team and on others, don't seem to like him.  Coaches don't usually leave a winning NFL team to take an assistant job in college.
  • He embarrasses his players by calling them out on the sidelines (and might not be respected by them, having not played in the NFL himself).
  • He seems easily angered and immature (wagging his finger at Denver's coach after a loss and then patting him on the head after a win).
  • He gives the STRANGEST press conferences ever.  He talks like someone just awoken from a heavily medicated slumber.  Mumbling and muttering his way through a litany of football cliches.  It's so consistently strange that I make it a point of listening to his press conferences on the radio each week, just to wonder at the oddity of it all.
Don't get me wrong, I like the Chiefs being mostly successful.  But I can't imagine Todd Haley being a beloved sports figure in Kansas City.  If he's just snap out of it and act a little more normal, it would help, but I'm not sure if he can…

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