KC homers, who's really on the hot seat?

[major-tom]

Will Peterson ever be held accountable, or is he setting up Cunningham? Will all the new additions gel fast enough?

 

http://www.cbs.sportsline.com/nfl/story/8478315

[Shotgun Messiahs]

12-4 this year baby.

[rattsass]

12-4 this year baby.

 

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And a first round home loss in the playoffs.

 

A typical season coming up.

[Big Talker]

I have to give Carl kudos. He did his part and got the players Gunther wanted. Now it's time for the coaching staff to put up or shut up.

[redman]

I love Gunther's shooting glasses.

[Rovers]

Peterson got the players Gunther wanted? I don't think so. He threw a ton of money at an oft injured Kendrall Bell, and didnt even know what position he got him for. Then, he drafted another OLB, in DJ. problem is, they needed an MLB. Gunther wasn't calling those shots, I'll bet the farm on that.

[Los Gigantes]

Peterson got the players Gunther wanted? I don't think so. He threw a ton of money at an oft injured Kendrall Bell, and didnt even know what position he got him for. Then, he drafted another OLB, in DJ. problem is, they needed an MLB. Gunther wasn't calling those shots, I'll bet the farm on that.

 

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they already have a solid mlb that continually improved as last seaosn went on: Kawika Mitchell.

 

Bell at WLB Mitchell at MLB and DJ at SLB looks strong to me.

[Beaumont]

they already have a solid mlb that continually improved as last seaosn went on:  Kawika Mitchell.

 

Bell at WLB Mitchell at MLB and DJ at SLB looks strong to me.

 

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Calling Mitchell solid is a little bit of a stretch ... they were not entirely pleased with his performance, but this is what they drafted him in the second round for ... I think Gunther is still tinkering, but Mitchell has at least as good a shot at MLB as Bell moving in there ... they appear to have their sights set on platooning Fujita and DJ right now ... its all in flux ...

[spain]

Where does Maslowski fit in the Chiefs plans?

[780]

Peterson got the players Gunther wanted? I don't think so. He threw a ton of money at an oft injured Kendrall Bell, and didnt even know what position he got him for. Then, he drafted another OLB, in DJ. problem is, they needed an MLB. Gunther wasn't calling those shots, I'll bet the farm on that.

 

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I didn't know Bell was injured. Vermeil said that he looked very explosive in camp.

[Beaumont]

Where does Maslowski fit in the Chiefs plans?

 

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He may still be in the mix for MLB if he is totally healed ... there was a definite downgrade in MLB when Maz went out and Mitchell went in last year ...

[muck]

Trying to think of a delicate way to say this...

 

Kawika Mitchell sucks.

[spain]

Trying to think of a delicate way to say this...

 

Kawika Mitchell sucks.

 

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Muck: As a long stading Huddle Vet, I think you owe it to us to let us know your true feelings on the LB situation in KC...

[Big Talker]

Peterson got the players Gunther wanted? I don't think so. He threw a ton of money at an oft injured Kendrall Bell, and didnt even know what position he got him for. Then, he drafted another OLB, in DJ. problem is, they needed an MLB. Gunther wasn't calling those shots, I'll bet the farm on that.

 

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As a matter of fact, Gunther got exactly the players he wanted, according to the following article that appeared in the KC Star on April 27. Hope you kept that farm.

 

http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/s...fs/11496319.htm

 

Cunningham gets what he wants for Chiefs' defense

 

By ADAM TEICHER

 

The Kansas City Star

 

On Jan. 22 — he remembers the exact date because he entered it in his log — Chiefs defensive coordinator Gunther Cunningham handed president/general manager Carl Peterson his player wish list.

 

Written on the piece of paper were the names of linebacker Kendrell Bell, safety Sammy Knight, end Carlos Hall and four cornerbacks, including Patrick Surtain.

 

“I told Carl that if we could get all of that done,” Cunningham said, “I could go home and sleep at night.”

 

After three agonizing months that included a self-imposed public silence (“I was paranoid and petrified I would say something wrong and mess the whole thing up,” he said), Cunningham was finally able to sleep soundly by the end of last week.

 

After making the trade with Miami for Surtain, the Chiefs had accomplished everything on Cunningham's list — and to top it off, they added Texas linebacker Derrick Johnson in the first round of the draft.

 

For Cunningham, it was Christmas in April, only better. No holiday gift had ever helped him win a football game.

 

Cunningham was comfortable talking about it all Tuesday. Most telling was the broad grin he couldn't shake the whole time through.

 

“I guess the thing I equate it to is having a game plan,” Cunningham said. “You make a lot of game plans in a season. Sometimes they work, and sometimes they don't. This one hit the jackpot. As far as I'm concerned, this is like a shutout win.”

 

The names on Cunningham's wish list were there because they share a quality he believes will help the Chiefs get back to where they were defensively when he was their coordinator in the middle and late 90s, a quality that has been lacking in the Dick Vermeil era.

 

“My theme throughout all of this was to turn the calendar back and add the explosion that this city and this organization are used to on defense,” Cunningham said. “Explosion is about speed. It's about suddenness in closing on the ball. All of these guys have that. Patrick and Sammy proved that with their turnovers. I saw Kendrell Bell single-handedly work over the Tennessee Titans offense. To me, he's a bigger Anthony Davis, and Anthony Davis had a lot of explosion, so he could make plays other people couldn't make.

 

“Carlos Hall has a lot of that, too. His best game is rushing the passer. So all four of those guys roll back the calendar, bring us back to the good old days. I never lost sight of what this defense brought to the table in the old days.”

 

With his personnel wishes fulfilled, Cunningham's immediate job is to figure how the new guys fit with the old. Some are easy to figure. Hall joins Eric Hicks and Jared Allen in the rotation at defensive end. Knight is the starting strong safety and will oust one of the longtime incumbents, Greg Wesley or Jerome Woods, from the starting lineup.

 

Surtain joins Eric Warfield as a starting cornerback. Surtain reminds Cunningham of a former great Chiefs cornerback.

 

“He's the same as James Hasty, and not just through his play but his attitude,” Cunningham said. “You ask Patrick Surtain about anything or anyone in the NFL, and he'll give you their bio. He studies the game, and that's how he plays. He'll see something, and then he'll pick your pocket. He has the instincts, the intelligence and the awareness. He's physical, too. He will tackle you in the running game.”

 

Cunningham compared the athletic Johnson not to any former Chiefs, but instead to Pro Bowl linebacker Keith Bulluck of Tennessee. Cunningham coached Bulluck with the Titans.

 

“The thing he will do is touch a lot of balls in the passing game,” Cunningham said. “He has an unusual knack for stripping the ball. But the best thing he does is close on the ball. Whether you blitz him or play him in coverage or whether he plays the run, he gets to the ball and he gets there fast.”

 

Cunningham's specific plans for Bell, Johnson and the rest of the linebackers are sketchy and flexible. After the Chiefs initially indicated Bell would start in the middle, Cunningham tentatively has him as right outside linebacker and has Johnson competing with Scott Fujita — if Fujita is healthy — on the left side. Kawika Mitchell is the starter in the middle.

 

“What you have to do is work the player and understand each player,” Cunningham said. “That's why we really don't have any depth charts around here. We take a good look at them and play the best ones. We can't give somebody a job because we think they can play. We have to know he can play.”

 

That comment appears aimed mostly at Mitchell, who has been slow to develop since joining the Chiefs as a second-round draft pick two years ago.

 

“I saw an upside in Kawika at the end of the year,” Cunningham said. “I think it's coming. For a lot of guys, it takes three years or more to play there unless you've got a rare guy.”

 

However the Chiefs line up in their Sept. 11 opener against the New York Jets at Arrowhead, Cunningham is having fun tinkering. His defense is brimming with possibilities that didn't exist a few weeks ago.

 

“You've got to recollect your thoughts as a coach because the euphoria we feel as an organization and as a city — I'm not deaf and blind, so I can see everybody is excited — that euphoria has to be under control,” Cunningham said. The next phase is about ready to begin. You have to keep your wits about you and not get too high or too low.

 

“I'm relaxed right now, but I need to get my game face back on.”

[Big Talker]

Another article from the Star about Gunther and his new players:

 

http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/sports/11533980.htm

 

Look out, Cunningham got his men

 

JOE POSNANSKI

 

If you know Gunther Cunningham at all, you already know what last year did to him. You don't need quotes to understand.

 

In his seven years in Kansas City as a defensive coordinator, then head coach, then coordinator again, Cunningham has never veiled his emotions. He has ranted and cried and babbled and inspired his team to play some great football. He coached dominant Chiefs defenses. He was head coach when Derrick Thomas died. He was hired, and he was fired. Always, his emotions were out there. You never needed an interpreter or mind reader to know what was bubbling inside him.

 

You know Gunther.

 

So, you don't need him to tell you that last year was the worst coaching year of his life. You don't need him to explain why. The Chiefs defense was all sorts of lousy two seasons ago, especially at the end of the year, and the Chiefs brought Cunningham back to save the day. He wasn't given new players to help him. No, instead, he was given a quest — he was Sir Galahad charged with pulling swords from stones and pulling big plays from the NFL's most porous defense.

 

Friends told him he couldn't do it; a coach needs players.

 

But Gunther said he would do it. “Failure is not an option,” he growled whenever someone asked how he could turn a bad defense into a good defense using the exact same players. He wanted to make it work so badly, he put together a defensive plan about twice as big as the 9/11 Commission Report. He came at the players with a feverish intensity pulled straight out of the Patton playbook.

 

There was one problem. Gunther's friends were right.

 

Not to get too technical, the defense had a lot of guys who could not play.

 

Of course, that's me talking. Gunther Cunningham would never say that. In fact, he didn't say much of anything, at least publicly. All last season, he privately banged his head against the wall and worked with his coaches to come up with a defensive shell game that might somehow stop offenses without the use of consistent defensive linemen, linebackers who could tackle, safeties who would hit or corners who could cover. It would have been a neat trick. Lance Burton would have been impressed.

 

He couldn't pull it off, of course. Gunther's not that good. Houdini was not that good.

 

So, no, you don't need Cunningham to tell you how lousy he felt, how lousy everyone felt when the Chiefs gave up 30 points week after week after week. You don't need him to explain how some weeks he would watch game film, and he wanted to throw up. And those were the good weeks. The bad weeks, he would sit in his office at 2 a.m. watching video of his defense giving up plays, and he would be trying to come up with something, anything. And he would realize that he was 58 years old, and he had spent his whole life putting his heart into football, he had spent much of his life trying to get Kansas City a football winner, and his defense couldn't stop anybody. And maybe for an instant he would think about hopping on a sailboat and just going wherever the wind took him.

 

You don't need him to tell you this:

 

“It was a very, very, very hard season,” he says in a weary voice.

 

When the season ended, Gunther Cunningham had a talk with Chiefs general manager Carl Peterson. These are two men who have been through a whole lot together — Peterson hired Cunningham, fired Cunningham, brought back Cunningham. They talked about a lot of things, and then at some point, Peterson asked Cunningham what he wanted, what he needed, to stop people. Cunningham gave him a list of players.

 

Peterson looked at the list. He said: “OK. Let's get it done.”

 

And the Chiefs went out and signed those players.

 

“I'm going to get emotional about this,” Cunningham says, and, yes, his voice chokes, and tears well up in his eyes. You know Gunther. “I know some people don't want to give Carl Peterson credit for anything. But I love that man, I'm telling you. He saved my life. We're going to turn back the clock now. We're going to make it fun for Kansas City fans to watch our defense play. It will be just like the old days.”

 

***

 

When you break it down, there were really only two problems with the Chiefs defense last season. They couldn't stop the run. And they couldn't stop the pass. If you want to measure bad defense, it's good to look at the old “yard per play” statistic. The Chiefs gave up 6.3 yards per play last season, by far the highest total in the NFL, nearly a half-yard more than the second-worst defense in football, the Tennessee Titans.

 

In other words, this is not a small remodeling job.

 

“Defense comes down to making plays,” Cunningham says. “You can't hide in this league. If you can't play, other teams will find you. If you have a weakness, other teams will exploit it. Football is not about excuses. You make the tackle or you don't. You get to the ball or you don't. Winners make plays. Losers talk about how close they were.”

 

This was the game plan — find playmakers. And Cunningham knew the Chiefs needed more than one or two playmakers; this team needed a full makeover. Cunningham wanted to begin with a linebacker who could run, make tackles and blitz the quarterback. Cunningham believes in a defense built around linebackers. He wanted Pittsburgh's Kendrell Bell, a 6-foot-1, 257-pound freight engine who has had some injury problems but has been a dominating force when healthy.

 

And the Chiefs signed Kendrell Bell.

 

“So much of defense is intimidation,” Cunningham says. “When we had those great defenses in the 1990s, with Derrick Thomas, Neil Smith, Dale Carter, James Hasty, we probably won some games just by walking on the field. We need some of that again. And man, when Kendrell Bell comes on the blitz, everybody knows it.”

 

Next, Cunningham wanted a shutdown corner, someone who would allow him to again play the sort of straight-up, man-to-man, in-your-face defense the Chiefs played in the 1990s. He gave Peterson a list of corners — Ty Law, Samari Rolle, Fred Smoot, etc. — and he would have been happy with any of them. But No. 1 on his list was Miami's Patrick Surtain, who has more interceptions the last five years than any cornerback in the NFL.

 

And the Chiefs traded for Patrick Surtain.

 

“Some people say Patrick Surtain is a gambler,” Cunningham says. “Well, if he's a gambler, then he's winning an awful lot of money. There are, in my mind, two kinds of defensive players. There are guys trying to play defense. And there are guys trying to win football games. Patrick Surtain is trying to win football games.”

 

He wanted a safety, someone who could get his hands on the ball. It's no secret that the Chiefs' biggest disappointment last season was the play of safeties Jerome Woods (who was the one defender to make the Pro Bowl in 2003) and Greg Wesley. The Chiefs had hoped to build their defense around those two young players — both signed huge six-year contract extensions in 2004 — and both took giant steps backward.

 

So the Chiefs signed Sammy Knight, who has 35 interceptions and nine forced fumbles in his eight-year career.

 

And finally, Cunningham really wanted Tennessee defensive end Carlos Hall. That was personal. Cunningham had watched Hall practice when he was coaching for the Titans. Hall has had an up-and-down career, but Cunningham sees a little bit of greatness in him.

 

“I see something special there,” Cunningham says. “I don't want to say too much about that. But I see something.”

 

So the Chiefs added four players and then drafted Texas linebacker Derrick Johnson, the consensus best linebacker in college football last year. So that's five likely starters this season — it's like a whole new defense.

 

And now that the players are in, you can see the joy on Cunningham's face.

 

“We have a whole lot of work to do, getting all these guys to play together and getting them all to understand what we're trying to do,” he says. “But I can tell you this: With this group, it will start looking like Chiefs football again. Everybody in this division — the Raiders, the Broncos, the Chargers, all of them — knows what I'm talking about. They've seen the players we got. They know. We're back.”

 

***

 

You know Gunther Cunningham. You know how emotional he is. You know that every day he looks out on the empty Arrowhead Stadium, and he imagines it filled with fans, all wearing red. He hears the echoes. He sees the Chiefs defense out there destroying offenses, like old times. He says he has the players to do that now.

 

And it gets him choked up.

 

“What this organization did — what Carl, all of our people, did — it's like a miracle. I'm telling you. As a coach, you can want players, but you know, realistically, that it's hard with the salary cap to get them. Well, we got them.

 

“Now, it's our job to make them into a great defense. We can do that. We will do that. I've got people coming up to me all the time, and they say: ‘Gun, when will it be like the old days? When will we start seeing the Chiefs defense again?' ”

 

Cunningham smiles again and swallows hard. You know Gunther.

 

“I just tell them to get ready,” he says. “It's coming. Get ready for the ride of your life.”

Edited May 20, 2005 by Big Talker

[Rovers]

At least it was a small farm. I don't doubt, and never did, that Gunther wanted Bell. But, did he want DJ? When there was a hole at the MLB spot? If he did, I really have to wonder if he this this defensive guru he's touted to be. Sorry, it just doesnt make sense to me. Not with some of the MLB's that were there in the draft like Ruud and Crowder. Heck, even McCune.

[Big Talker]

At least it was a small farm.    I don't doubt, and never did, that Gunther wanted Bell. But, did he want DJ? When there was a hole at the MLB spot? If he did, I really have to wonder if he this this defensive guru he's touted to be. Sorry, it just doesnt make sense to me. Not with some of the MLB's that were there in the draft like Ruud and Crowder. Heck, even McCune. 

 

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Like the article said, what Gunther wanted was playmakers, and so, yeah, I'm sure he's thrilled to get Derrick Johnson.

 

Yes, there are questions about who will play MLB, but whoever is in the middle should have great support with Bell and DJ playing on either side--unless Gunther decides to move Bell to the middle after all, in which case he'll have Fujita or Barber (when he heals up) to take the other OLB spot.

 

I never thought I could say this a few months ago, but LB may actually become a position of *strength* for the Chiefs next year. (Notice I said "may!" I won't bet the farm on that. )

[Swampnuts]

12-4 this year baby.

 

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You're high.