Bills line, meet your new coach. New coach, meet your line.
Actually, if my Twitter and Facebook are any indicators, Marcell – meet the sadistic son of a monk that’s going to make you skip rope with your entrails. Be afraid, be very afraid.
(This was the happiest photo I could find of Coach Waufle – and he still looks like the tic that allows him to slap the taste out of your mouth is about to activate. Madre di Dios..)
In the road to going from good to great or from great to excellent, you need mentors. You need someone to drive you and pull out of you something you may not thing you have. In the case of Marcell Dareus, we’ve seen him in the Pro Bowl twice, we’ve seen him as an All-Pro and we’ve seen him amass sacks on sack on sacks – but the rehab debacle, coupled with the hamstring and groin issues have led many fans to be soured on the former Crimson Tide player and feel Waufle will beat the player he can be out of him.
I really, really hope that’s not the Bills’, McDermott’s nor Waufle’s plan.
Why? Do I want players coddled? No, but I want them respected. Coaching to me at its core is teaching. How many of you – how many of us have responded well with someone disrespecting you at every turn? Now add in a few million dollars and this fact – in 2017 the Bills will have a 30 million dollar cap hit in dead money and lose 14 million in cap space to move Dareus. In 2018 the amount is 16.5 million in dead money and they get back two million in space.
The Bills can’t trade or cut Marcell until 2019 at the soonest. So, if the goal is to “run him til his tongue falls out” or “take his sailor hat off his head”, the pair of statements I’ve read on Twitter at least 10-20 times each this weekend that solves nothing. He knows he can’t get cut – and he knows they can’t move him. So that’s going to be an empty threat the staff or team as a whole will not honor.
You can watch the Hard Knocks footage, or you can read Chris Brown’s mini profile, which are great insights into Coach Waufle. Chris did bury the lede a bit – while Waufle was an MP, he solved a murder and stopped a bank robbery? This guy is the best of Leroy Jethro Gibbs and Jack Reacher. I would want Z-E-R-O part in messing with that.
Luckily, reading up on Coach Waufle I’m confident he’s going to be a guy that makes the relationship matter to allow the discipline the former Marine wants to see on field with his players. This story on his relationship with Michael Strahan was what really sold me that there’s going to be a relationship established – not merely a “yes sir, no sir” platonic ideal of fandom:
“Oh, it was a love fest,” Waufle joked earlier this week, retelling the story of how he played highlight after highlight of Strahan using impeccable technique to dominate at the point of attack, the perfect blend of strength, skill and speed.
“When we were finished with that praise, he got up and got to the door when I said, ‘Hey Michael, if you’ve got a little more time, I have 10 more plays I want to show you.’ ”
Strahan obliged and Waufle began showing another video he prepared for the occasion, complete with plays “of him loafing around, going through the motions. There weren’t many – I found 10 in all my tape of him – but he got the message. For our time together, for the rest of his career, Michael was going to play hard all the time.”
The eye in the sky – and the coach with the remote control – grounded Strahan.
He was about to enter his 11th season a long way from the Pro Football Hall of Fame, into which he will be welcomed tonight as one of the best players in NFL history, let alone one of the greatest to wear a Giants uniform.
That passage got me more hyped for Waufle than any f bomb or threat to destroy a player could. As much as Marcell and his myriad issues get the daylight, the Bills’ top pass rusher has a penchant for offsides and personal fouls. They have a first rounder that needs to get tools to get him to the next level. They have a third rounder that needs help in staying on the field. Waufle will give them just as much coaching them up. And if fans want to really dig deep – those issues are far easier to coach out of Hughes, Lawson and Washington than it is to grab a Marcell Dareus and say “hey, put away all that traumatic awful stuff, you have a job to do.”
If you’re going with the Sully 202 course on empathy and treating players like people and not your paid Madden representatives, you can skip right on by me. But if you’re looking for coaches to make this a two way street, a true collaborative experience to get where they want to go? I’m all in.
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