It's no secret that Favre has looked more like a 41-year-old this year and less like the quarterback who resurrected all the insufferable "He's a kid out there" cliches that he teased Vikings fans with last year. He leads the world in interceptions and turnovers, he's hobbled by injuries and he's a long way from being the Pro Bowl quarterback who led the Vikings to within a drive of the Super Bowl last season.
Now, the Vikings sit at 3-7, all but gone from the playoff picture.
And because of that dramatic regression, Childress was removed from his duties as the head football coach of the Minnesota Vikings on Monday. In the end, though, even with Favre's erratic play, Chilly only has himself to blame.
All along, Childress made it no secret that he was going to hitch his wagon to Favre and ride No. 4 until the end of the road. The end of the road came Monday moring.
Childress' insistence to have Favre under center sent the message to the rest of the Vikings' locker room that it was Favre who would ultimately call the shots. For a year, that went great. Favre got most of the credit, but Childress was safe. So safe, in fact, that the Vikings gave him a contract extension last November.
The thing about 41-year-old quarterbacks is, well, they're 41-year-old quarterbacks. And even the seemingly ageless Brett Favre will hit a wall eventually. Favre hit that wall this season and the wall hit back even harder.
If it's implied that Favre is calling the shots, then that's fine so long as the team is winning. But when he starts to struggle, the team starts to struggle. And by that point, the team starts to tune out the head coach, especially if that head coach has put all of his eggs into one basket — Favre.
The ironic thing, too, is that the newly-hired Childress wanted to take Tarvaris Jackson in the 2006 draft. The Vikings did, that didn't exactly work out and Childress panicked. That eventually led to the hot pursuit of Favre, both following Favre's final season in Green Bay and two years ago when Childress talked Favre out of retirement to come back and play with the Vikings.
There were plenty of signs this season that this was coming though. The Vikings are a bad team now, but more importantly, seemingly no player in that locker room had the back of the head coach. Players have come out recently, mostly off the record, and said that they're playing for themselves and some even went as far as saying they didn't have their coach's back, because they felt he didn't have theirs. That's when it was time to move on.
When a coach loses his team, his pink slip often falls close behind. The best coaches in the business don't let that happen. Bill Belichick traded Randy Moss pretty much out of the blue at the first sign of that happening. Of course, Moss ended up in Minnesota and we all know how that turned out.
Brad Childress and the Vikings had a window with Brett Favre and the team they have now. That window, though, closed shut faster than the Vikings and Childress would have liked, and in the end, it was Childress who got his fingers caught in that window. He lost his team while trying to pass through the window and he lost his job because of it.
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