ChiefsPlanet - Chiefs Mellinger: Clark Hunt needs to make major changes

Wow when did the KC Star columnists finally grow balls?

More good reading...

http://www.kansascity.com/2012/09/16...r-changes.html

Hunt needs to make major changes to fix this Chiefs mess

By SAM MELLINGER

The Kansas City Star

ORCHARD PARK, N.Y. -- The last drops of reasonable belief that the Chiefs aren’t wasting their fans’ time and money are now dead, kaput, ashes from a fire of fail burning so white-hot it needed just two games to turn a hopeful season into a lost one.

This is a level of ineptitude beyond even what Kansas City has sadly become accustomed to, and because owner Clark Hunt is not his father, a shameful, 35-17 loss to a bad Bills team here on Sunday should be remembered as the tipping point of general manager Scott Pioli’s job security.

Last week, you heard talk about the Falcons being good and the Chiefs being injured. What’s the excuse now?

Football is the most team of our sports, and top-to-bottom incompetence like this doesn’t happen without every coach and player doing their fair share. So blame whomever you want. The offense is terrible, the defense is worse, and the special teams have given up touchdowns in both games.

For a symbol of the Chiefs’ problems, start with their knuckleheaded star receiver pointing to the name on the back of his jersey after scoring an irrelevant fourth-quarter touchdown. Romeo Crennel is in charge of what might become the most talented 3-13 team in recent league history.

Pioli, of course, oversees it all with a misplaced faith in Matt Cassel and an overly conservative and think-too-much style that’s four years into trying to replicate what Bill Belichick and Tom Brady created in New England.

Four years is enough time to fairly judge an NFL GM, and so far Pioli looks like a substitute teacher. He is failing — badly — and to save his football reputation, and shelve serious questions about his job, he needs the kind of turnaround over the next 14 games that is quite unfathomable at the moment.

Pioli wants time, patience and understanding but hasn’t earned any of it. The first year was for building. The second year was promising.

The third year was a drama-filled mess. The fourth year has the look of something even worse, because the Chiefs don’t have injuries or former coach Todd Haley to blame.

Only one man has the power to make the necessary changes now, and Hunt isn’t doing his job if he’s not brainstorming who his next general manager should be. Let’s hope the list includes men willing to be bold, comfortable in their own skin and able to properly position the Chiefs in what is firmly an elite quarterback’s league.

Because this isn’t working, and Hunt doesn’t have his father’s patience and blind faith. The Chiefs are broken, from top to bottom, and the solution has to stand up to the grand scale of these problems.

Last year, it took an embarrassing loss and childish sideline display against the Jets for Haley to lose his job.

This year, the focus turns to Pioli, and it’s on Hunt to make it clear this isn’t good enough.

Last year, Pioli and the Chiefs dumped as much blame as they could shovel onto Haley.

This year, Hunt has to see the same problems.

Pioli came to Kansas City promising multiple championships and a consistent approach focused on building “The Right 53,” not necessarily “the best 53.”

Instead, he’s on his second head coach and fifth offensive coordinator, and his four years in Kansas City are known much more for middle-school-type drama than consistency. He came here talking about modeling after the Steelers but created something closer to The Real Housewives of the NFL.

After four offseasons and four drafts, it remains true that most of this team’s best players were here before Pioli: Tamba Hali, Jamaal Charles, Derrick Johnson, Dwayne Bowe and Brandon Flowers, among them.

I don’t know how much Pioli’s obsession over every detail is to blame here, but I do know he spends far too much time worrying about the wrong things: negative media attention, how one player’s contract might feed another player’s jealousy, and inner-office minutiae that should be handled by middle managers.

The previous GM essentially served a 17-year appointment of near-complete control under Lamar Hunt but lasted just two years under Clark, who then made sure to split football and business decision-making.

Clark Hunt headed an Arrowhead Stadium renovation that drove increased profits to the club, and then played a key role in the NFL’s avoiding a work stoppage last year. He and Pioli have overseen a massive turnover in the work force, transcending what used to be an organization driven largely by loyalty into one obsessed with the bottom line.

Four years into what was supposed to be a different era for the Chiefs, they are instead a bumbling mess.

Pioli is believed to have one more year on his contract, and Hunt hasn’t shown himself to have the tethered loyalty of his father.

A defensive coordinator hired to be head coach won’t give up his old job, and the defense has given up eight touchdowns in two games. An offensive coordinator plucked from Pioli’s past can’t figure out how to use a loaded group of skill players.

It’s not just that the Chiefs have loads of problems, it’s that they appear so completely out of solutions. Things move fast in the NFL, and Pioli hasn’t shown himself able to keep up.

This is an awful look for the GM in a season we’ve said will ultimately define how he’s remembered in Kansas City.

We are only two games into the season, so the ultimate narrative is yet to be written.

But if the results don’t drastically change, then the general manager should.