Why Herm Should Not be Blamed for our Horrible Defense

Now before you to begin to bash me for protecting Herm, know this. I do not want Herm around next year. Whether or not he is a good coach, you cannot have the record that he has accumulated and expect to be the coach of the same team next year.

However...

I do not think that Herm should be held completely responsible for the atrocious defense that we fielded this year. As a head coach, Herms job is to make sure that practices are ran efficiently and effectively, as well as managing plays, and in some cases, calling plays near the end of a game. One might say that by the looks of how the Chiefs preformed this year, he did not do any of the above effectively. Now, to be honest, I have to agree with you. Herm failed to make the right call at the right time and it actually contributed to a few losses. 

But, I do not think that Herm is as bad as he appears on paper. Before I go on, I will remind the reader once again that I do believe that Herm should be fired. I am writing this article for the sole purpose that I think Herm is a nice guy, and not nearly as bad of a coach as he seemed to be in KC. Anyways, back to the point.  As a defensive coordinater, I understand the relationship between a HC and DC to a certain extent ( this obviously differs between college and NFL, as well the certain individual), but I do know, for the most part, how things operate. During the course of a season, the HC of my team never spoke to me about our defense. Despite starting of the season allowing 4 passing touchdowns (dont get me started...), the HC did not ask a single question. He did come up with ideas, but in no way forced me to act upon them. This is what you would classify as trust. My boss trusted me to come up with a way to fix our defensive woes despite having his job on the line. Eventually, we did figure out what the problem was and fixed our defense, but that the ONLY reason why that was is because my boss trusted me enough to let me continue to coach and fix the issues that we were experiencing.

When it comes to Herm, I believe that he experienced the same dilemma.  This season, I believe that Herm put his trust in Gunther and ol' Gunny let him down (mind you, I have never been a fan of Gun). I know that some of you will quick to blame Herm for trusting Gun in the first place, and that is fair. However, I will ask you have you ever had a girl/ guy cheat on you when you thought you could trust them? The point is that no matter if Herm made the right decision or not, I believe he made his decision based on trust, and gun let him down. If we had fielded a competent defense, would we had lost as many games as we did? Probably not. However, our HC made a mistake and trusted the wrong guy, resulting in him being on the hot seat for only winning two games in a season.

I am not trying to campaign for Herm to keep his job, nor am I saying that he did a bad job. The point of this article is to say that when it comes to our defense, I do not think it was entirely Herms fault. Yes, he failed to bring in necessary talent to challenge players for their position (hello Pat Thomas), and he also didn't give the defense much of a shot at all at the beginning of the year with the offense we fielded. However, in terms of the defensive state of the Chiefs, I believe it was Gunther, not Herm, who led us to failure as a defensive unit.

So, call for Herms head all you want. Chances are, I'll be with you. Just please make sure that when you are doing this, you have a picture of Gunny up there just as high as Herms head because I strongly believe that he is as responsible for the Chiefs short-comings as Herm Edwards is himself. The only difference between the two is that Herm should get a secoind chance somewhere else, and Gunther should not.