Earlier in the year, the hot seat talk surrounding the Kansas City Chiefs head coach Todd Haley was red hot. In fact, it seemed like he might be the first coach fired of this NFL season. Now the Chiefs are hot as a team and riding a three game winning streak into Monday’s game against the San Diego Chargers for the division lead. With it comes Chiefs owner Clark Hunt’s announcement that there’s no talk of replacing Haley.
“They have an excellent relationship,” Hunt says of general manager Scott Pioli and Haley. “I understand there’s been a lot of focus on that subject. But in the time I’ve been around them, they work very well together. They have a shared vision for the kind of football team they’re trying to build.”
Hunt says the player personnel side is also something they share and that strengthens the bond between them.
“Most importantly, they approach the player personnel side very much from the same perspective. I rarely if ever have seen them disagree on a player, whether it’s a draft choice or a free agent. It doesn’t mean they don’t have discussions where they share different viewpoints about players, but at the end of the day they reach an agreement and move forward with whatever the decision is on the player.”
It’s interesting to hear this when a writer like Yahoo!‘s Mike Silver notes that the tension between the two is one of the “”http://kansascity.sbnation.com/kansas-city-chiefs/2011/9/19/2435138/chief-concerns-tension-between-scott-pioli-and-todd-haley-worst-kept-secret-nfl-kansas-city-chiefs" target="new">worst kept secrets in the NFL." That’s not something Silver would throw out there lightly if there wasn’t some truth to it.
For now it seems that winning is the cure-all in the NFL. Haley has been publicly backed by the highest of powers and the Chiefs have seen the drama fade from the media. A win against the Chargers will only further that positivity.