Childress has never hid the fact that he wants to have a run-oriented offense. He also wants to be an effective run-stopping defense, hence the tampa 2 scheme. People who don’t realize these things tend to criticize Childress and Co. for not doing enough of the opposite of these philosophies. Look its not going to happen. People want us to throw more, but in the past we had lousy QB play, and mediocre receiver play and a run-first mentality. We still are run-first, but with a much better QB and much better receiver play we are passing more, are we not?
People have complained about our pass defense. Yes at times it has been very vunerable. But in a Tampa 2 scheme, you play with your corners up and only 2 deep so that you can stop the run! This philosophy has lead to the number 1 Defense against the run in Childress’s first 3 years. The resulting big numbers that opposing offenses have piled up through the air caused Childress not to change his philosophy, but rather to keep his philosophy and go after the best pass rushing DE in the league to reduce the passing yards and guess what? He got him.
Two things I personally have questioned are some of his playcalling and time management. But again, I questioned these things not because I think I would make a better coach, but because I might have a different philosophy of what to do in those situations. Take the Baltimore game. Childress allowed Baltimore to run nearly all the time off the clock before kicking the last FG. Essentially he was saying we’re going to block this kick so why take a time out and allow them to time to advance the ball further before kicking. In my mind I was thinking if they make it, we won’t have anytime left for our Offense to get the ball back. It was a ballsy decision on his part and it turned out to be the right one, but I will admit, I was questioning it because my philosophy of what to do in that situation was different.
Now take the Pitt game. He choose to pass on the goalline, run draws on 3rd and long and take a knee with 25 seconds left before the half. Plays we could all easily question. But what was the philosophy behind that? Probably something like this: we are on the road in a hostile environment, against the reigning super bowl champs so we cant afford to allow “Uncle Mo” to sway drastically in their favor. Well that conservative approach worked for the first 50 plus minutes and had us in a position to win the game. A few players just had a little mental break down (Favre should have thrown that ball in the dirt, or Chester should have caught the damn ball!) at the end and 1 bad call prevented the win. Plus, had Favre connected on either of those passes, we’d all be calling him a genius for using AD as a decoy.

Childress has been a pain to me, and I may never understand his fascination with Nafahu Tahi, but he has certainly improved over his time here.

Has he improved enough? We will see. But his play calling has gotten more aggressive and I appreciate the effort.

Still struggles mightily with late game time management and holding on to 2+ score leads. That should be next on his list.