When the 17 members of Mike Shanahan’s coaching staff in Washington signed a statement disagreeing with the brief filed last week by the NFL Coaches Association in support of the effort to lift the lockout, we expected that many other coaching staffs would follow suit.
Though we expected it to come more quickly, but it’s still coming.
The Chiefs have become the latest to join the list of coaching staffs to say that the NFLCA isn’t speaking for them.
“In talking to all of our guys, there was a great deal of surprise this was filed on their behalf,” Haley told the Kansas City Star. “Nobody was aware that it was going to happen. This was not on behalf of the coaches.”
Other coaching staffs that have expressed disagreement with the NFLCA brief include the Saints, Jaguars, Cowboys, Rams, and Texans.
That’s nearly 25 percent of the coaches that the name “NFL Coaches Association” purports to encompass. And that’s why we should always be skeptical of any group with a name that, on the surface, implies that it speaks for a much broader group of people than it really does.
So for whom does the NFLCA really speak? We’ll have a little more on this one later in the day.