According to NFL Network analyst Jamie Dukes, some Broncos players have trust issues with their new head coach Josh McDaniels.
Jay Cutler isn’t the only player who has developed trust issues with first-year Broncos coach Josh McDaniels. A few other players have privately expressed concern, and the media has joined the chorus in feeling that McDaniels has a problem with honesty.
Some would say this is no big deal, but trust is the cornerstone of this society. We need to be able to trust our government. Trust is essential to marriage and relationships. We need to be able to trust our children. We need to be able to trust our friends.
As a former NFL player, I can tell you that trust is the foundation between the player and the coach. When players trust their coach, they play at another level. Unfortunately, truthfulness seems to be a character trait that Bill Belichick didn’t pass down to young McDaniels.
Thanks for the life lesson Jamie – I’ll certainly store that information in my back pocket and break it out from time to time.
As part of his blog entry, Dukes uses the Brandon Marshall situation as another example of how some of the players don’t trust McDaniels. And maybe secretly they don’t trust their new head coach – after all, he didn’t handle the situation with Cutler appropriately and he does seem to have that Belichick air of secrecy in the way he goes about things.
But Dukes doesn’t tell us anything new here. He recaps the Cutler and Marshall situations and then uses the “I was a former player, so I should know” reasoning to state his opinion. And anyone that watches Dukes on the NFL Network knows that this guy brings nothing to the table as a journalist. So when he comes out with a story like this, it’s important to take it with a grain of salt.
Again, I’m not saying that he’s wrong, but I question the fact that he was so general when he said that, “a few other players have privately expressed concern,” and then goes on to mention only the names everyone else already knows about. If other players did express concern to Dukes about McDaniels, he could have printed what they said without using their names. But instead, he used a blanket statement and moved on without providing much detail.