Haley Should Show More Confidence In His First Place Chiefs

Kansas City Chiefs coach Todd Haley is telling anyone who will listen that his team does not play pretty football. He says it in nearly every press conference and interview.

In fact,  Haley is beginning to sound more like a politician delivering a stump speech than a football coach leading a first place, undefeated team.

While no one who has actually watched the Chiefs play this year is predicting a Super Bowl run, would it kill Haley to throw his team a bone?

The Chiefs are playing ugly football but they are winning. I understand that Haley is trying to temper expectations but his refrain can’t be inspiring much confidence in his players. While the Chiefs may be shallow on depth, they have a lot of players with talent and big play ability. Guys like Jamaal Charles, Tamba Hali, Dexter McCluster, Brandon Flowers and Derrick Johnson have shown they can break a big play for their team at any given time.

And they look good doing it.

I like that Haley knows his team may have to fight, scratch and claw their way to every yard, first down and win. That is all a part of teaching a young team how to win the close games and winning close games in the NFL can be the difference between a losing season and a playoff run.

Yet along with knowing how to gut out the close games, players also need confidence. They need to play with swagger and they need to expect to win. These qualities can carry a team a long way. Confidence gets players out of their head. It is infectious.

We’ve seen the results confidence has on players. Derrick Johnson has been plagued by mental mistakes and a lack of confidence his entire career. Looking brilliant one week and awful the next, we often heard his coaches saying that Derrick needed to just stop thinking and just play football.

This year, DJ appears to be doing just that. Through two games he has been flying all over the field, trusting his instincts and making plays.

Sooner or later the entire Chiefs team, including their head-coach, are going to need to take on that attitude.

Right now, it appears the Chiefs strategy is to make fewer mistakes than their opponent and hope that is enough to squeeze out a victory. That has worked thus far but there will come a time when this Chiefs team will need to come out and smack their opponent in the mouth. There will come a time when hanging on for dear life just isn’t going to work, when they have their backs against the wall and they need to go on the offensive.

Regardless of how they got there, the Kansas City Chiefs deserve to be in first place. They played on the same field as their opponents, in the same conditions and they played better football. Call it luck if you want but a good friend recently told me that luck is a result of good preparation.

The Chiefs have been well prepared by their excellent coaching staff. Now they need to be built up a little, especially by their head-coach. I’m not saying Todd Haley should go about shooting his mouth off like Rex Ryan, declaring his team the AFC West champions with 14 games to go. However, he could lay off talking about how inferior his team is to team’s like the San Diego Chargers. He could stop pointing out the obvious; like that his team will often have to win ugly.

The area that most needs some of that confidence is the offense, particularly QB Matt Cassel. Cassel is playing worse this year than he did in 2009 and with more weapons and better protection.

His problem appears to be confidence.

I’m not sure what happened to cause this fluctuation in Cassel’s play but the Chiefs coaching staff needs to find out what makes him tick, because for better or worse, he is theire guy.

The 2010 Chiefs are running well and playing solid defense and special teams. If they can inspire their QB and WR’s there really is no telling how far the Chiefs could go.

Without confidence, however, “winning ugly” could turn into “losing ugly” for Haley and the Chiefs.