KANSAS CITY, Mo. – The spin is coming, it’s been coming, all sorts of neatly packaged reasons that Charlie Weis is quitting as Kansas City Chiefs offensive coordinator to take the same job at the University of Florida.
Weis will stay with the Chiefs through the playoffs, but after that, he wants to be closer to his son. He wants to have his whole family in one place. Or he wants to get away from the grind of the NFL and back on campus, where he wants another try at being a head coach someday. He’s had some health scares recently, and his priorities have shifted away from pro football.
On and on and on the reasons go. You can listen to them all day, and there’s probably a little truth in most of them.
But logic-centered people can clearly see the Chiefs now have a potentially big problem on their hands, bigger than concerns over an entirely uninspired 31-10 blowout loss to the Raiders on Sunday.
Today, even as he’s a legitimate candidate for NFL coach of the year, Todd Haley looks like an impossible man to work for, ego and insecurity driving two veteran offensive coordinators away in a 16-month span.
The Chiefs and Haley will strongly deny all of this, of course, but there is too much circumstantial evidence stacking up, too much behind-the-scenes posturing, too much pettiness to believe anything else.
Weis and Haley never got along, not completely, not in the way that two men need to get along to work the long hours and high stakes of the NFL. Nobody is surprised by this, the young and fiery head coach not becoming BFFs with the older and just-as-fiery assistant who used to be his boss.
It was a shotgun marriage of convenience and personal gain for both sides. Haley got a capable and credible coordinator who allowed him to spend less time in the grueling details and more time in the big-picture duties of a head coach. Weis got a chance to build success after a miserable ending in Notre Dame and do it working with people he’s familiar with.
In the beginning, everyone said all the right things, particularly Weis, who right away even called Haley “the boss.”
But at some point, the conflicts began to bubble. A lot of it became exaggerated gossip built mostly on speculation and secondhand he-said/she-said, but the basic narrative is that both sides understood this would be a short-term deal.
The Chiefs’ offense blossomed this year, particularly with the quarterback Weis said he came to “fix,” and then came a scramble for who would get the credit. Naturally, a lot of it went to Weis, and some within the Chiefs began to talk up the contributions of Haley and assistant Nick Sirianni.
An important dichotomy began to emerge between the preaching about unity and the private efforts to divide credit. The irony is that a clear effort to control the message has now opened room for people to use varying degrees of informed speculation to assess what is now a national story.
The easy thing is to blame egos, and there are some considerable ones at work here, on all sides. But this is also an awful lot of insecurity. Both qualities often help drive ambitious and successful people in all walks of life, but like anything, it’s best in moderation.
Chiefs general manager Scott Pioli declined to discuss anything beyond what Haley said in his postgame news conference, which included the public company talking points about appreciating Weis’ contributions, respecting his decision and denying any conflicts.
The last time Weis took a college job before his NFL season was over, he stayed on to help the Patriots win the Super Bowl, so the Chiefs insist they won’t suffer from split attention.
This is a successful season for the Chiefs, no matter the ugliness of Sunday or what happens in the playoff game next Sunday. Matt Cassel proved a lot of people wrong, and, yes, I’m near the top of the list. Jamaal Charles is one of the league’s best running backs, Dwayne Bowe is now a legitimate star, and the defense is showing vast improvement.
None of that disappears now just because Weis is making a parallel move from the Chiefs to college.
But aren’t you starting to wonder whether the underlying issues that kept Weis from sticking around will keep Haley and the Chiefs from reaching this “ultimate goal” they’re always talking about?