Bill Muir to Call Plays

KC Star

What may have come as a huge surprise days before the preseason started is all but a foregone conclusion that has now been confirmed: offensive coordinator Bill Muir will be calling the plays during the regular season.

Now if any other team had told you that their offensive coordinator was calling plays, you would kind of look at them like they just said something blatantly obvious. But here in KC, there was a bit of a debate about who would, and should, call the plays.

After it was announced that Charlie Weis was leaving for Florida after the 2010 season, head coach Todd Haley was asked time and time again what the plans for playcalling would be in 2011. He would repeat the same "thorough evaluation" stuff every time he was asked and never ruled out calling the plays himself, saying "I'll consider anything."

Many fans remembered the ineffectiveness of the 2009 season, the first season of Haley's reign and one in which he called all the offensive plays himself. Many of these same fans were extremely opposed to the idea of Haley calling the offensive plays again, considering the success the Chiefs had in 2010 with a full-time offensive coordinator. On the other hand, many people speculated that Haley would be calling the plays himself because he was the best man for the job. As Michael Lombardi from NFL Network put it: "I think really at this point Todd needs to take it over.... Bringing someone who has never done it before and he's sitting there and he's done it....You see Bill Belichick. He doesn't have a defensive coordinator on staff. You see him calling defenses because he knows he's the most qualified guy to do that."

While most fans would agree that Todd Haley is no Bill Belichick, I think most Chiefs fans would agree that they were surprised when offensive line coach Muir was promoted to fill Weis's shoes. Don't get me wrong, Muir has more experience than father time (and just as many years too), but he's never actually called plays before.

This promotion seemed to cement in fans minds that Haley just made this move because he was wanting to call the plays himself. After all, why else would they just promote Muir the way they did? Surely Haley doesn't expect him to call plays for the first time in his extremely long football career....

Well indeed that does seem to be what Haley is intending to do with Muir. Our first glimpse of his intentions was revealed when Jim Zorn announced Muir would be calling plays in the first preseason game against Tampa Bay. Then it was announced he would be calling plays for the remainder of the preseason. Now its been announced today by Haley that Muir will be the man in charge of calling plays for the regular season.

And the people who couldn't stand the thought of Haley calling plays in 2011 just doubted themselves even more than they already have after watching four poorly called preseason games.

Now Haley did mention a sort of condition that comes with Muir calling the plays. It will be a group effort between all the offensive coaches and even the quarterback staff. "And like I've said, really the play calling for us, and really a lot of places I've been, will be a group effort throughout the week of kinda trying to get everybody on the same page for gameday. Each and every week that's been an area that takes some work in practice and you can really only get that work in games and I feel like we made progress as a staff throughout the preseason and now it's the regular season and we're ready to go."

As much as this group effort of game scripting intrigues me, it still can't pre-determine everything that will happen during the course of a game; it can't tell you what plays will work for a 2-minute scoring drive to win the game. Those are still determined by the split-second decision role that is the offensive coordinator.

So who do you want making those decisions?