Arrowhead Pride

This media session was no different than any other for Herm Edwards despite the perception that his job is on the line. It was the same "Business as usual" speech we've heard so many times before.

Although Herm's record as a head coach makes it debatable as to whether he should even be a coach or not, he is resilient.  He's a positive person and I can see how he's been deemed a "players coach."

Click on over to the other side to see the grade Herm gives himself on the season.

On what the coaching staff and front office do now:

“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.”

Herm expects the new GM to be in line with his thinking on the rebuilding process:

“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.”

Refuting the report that he told his assistant coaches to look for other jobs:

“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.”

On his perception as a coach in the NFL:

“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.”

On whether the game against the Bengals will sour a new GM on him:

“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.”

On whether he would like to become a GM someday:

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

Talking about the defense:

“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."

On whether he wished they had added more veteran players via free agency:

“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.”

How many players away are the Chiefs from competing?

“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."

On Larry Johnson wanting to leave Kansas City:

“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."

Will the Chiefs move away from the spread?

“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.”

Herm grades himself:

“I would give myself about a ‘C.’”

Read the full interview here.