Not that anybody asked, but...

On today’s major league baseball coaching staff’s, it’s common for the manager to have a bench coach.

The bench coach serves as a sort of consigliere. He’s usually someone with managerial experience in the big leagues and someone whose baseball IQ the manager trusts. The bench coach consults with the manager on strategy and personnel moves during the game, like when’s the right time to pinch hit for a starting pitcher who’s running out of gas. Or when to execute a double switch. The bench coach is like a second manager for a baseball team.

I was wondering last night if this bench coach business could work in football, particularly with a team like the Vikings. Rare is the Vikings game where fans/broadcasters/football writers aren’t seriously questioning some in-game decision made by head coach Brad Childress.

Now second-guessing from fans and the media is the norm with any coach. But it seems to happen more often with Childress. And because it appears that Childress – and how do I put this diplomatically? – struggles making the correct decision during the heat of battle, I think Chilly would benefit greatly from having a bench coach on his staff; someone who has been through the NFL wars as a head coach and could be a sober voice that Childress could consult when a critical in-game decision comes up. Understand that I'm not talking about an assistant head coach, who usually is in charge of a specific unit of the team, but a coach whose job is to work on strategy and in-game decisions and that's all.

Take the fourth-and-one situation the Vikings faced last Sunday late in the first-half with the ball on the Giants 39-yard line. Here’s how the conversation between Childress and his bench coach might have gone down.

Childress: Darn! Chester just got stuffed on the run up the middle for no gain. How did the Giants sniff that one out? It’s like Spagnuolo can read my mind!

Well, we gotta go for it here. We need that field goal from Longwell. Gotta go for the throat and take a 13-6 lead into half-time.

Bench coach: Ahhh, Brad. It’s a long fourth-and-one, probably more like a fourth-and-a-yard-and-a-half. Outside the 67-yard run, Peterson’s got minus-15 yards on his other carries. And we’ve only completed seven passes for about 20 yards. I think we should punt.

Childress: But Bevell and I have cooked up this great play call – a quarterback draw. Tarvaris ran for 76 yards last week. The play is money.

Bench coach: But Brad, Spagnuolo is going to have, like, 10 guys on the line of scrimmage because he knows we won’t pass. If we don’t get it, and I’m pretty sure we won’t, we’re giving the Giants the ball at their 40-yard line with timeouts left. A couple of completions and they're in field goal range. They also get the opening kick-off to start the second half. We need to punt.

Childress: Hmmmmm.

(Childress proceeds to change his mind and punt the ball)


See how easy sound football decision-making could be?

Now there are some problems with the bench coach concept in football. The big one is that there’s time constraints in football that aren’t there in baseball. Things happen faster. You don’t have two or three innings to figure out what you’re going to do if a), b), c) or even d) happens. You have 20 or 30 seconds (and sometimes not even that much) to make a call.

However, I think the head coach/bench coach dynamic would be okay. Coaches would adapt to the faster pace of the game to debate and make their decisions quicker. You can also do mock scenarios during the week and try to anticipate down and distance situations and what you will do if you are faced with them.

The other problem with bringing in an experienced football guy as a bench coach is that he could be viewed as a threat to the head coach’s authority and job security.

And I guess that could be an issue. But if your head coach is a confident guy, which you’d expect any NFL coach to be, I don’t think he's going to be threatened by bringing in an ex-head coach.

Anyway, there's some things that would have to be worked out for the bench coach concept to work. But I think it could work. And Childress could use the help.

This bit was going to be part of a week 18 two-minute drill post. But it’s January 1 and I want to watch some college football. So I’ll be back tomorrow with some thoughts about the Vikings/Eagles game.

Until then, Happy New Year.