Vikes Wade-ed Too Late to Release Bobby

So Bobby Wade was let go, right before the beginning of the regular season, and right after he agreed to a 50% pay cut. Ouch. This is just another example of the…uneasiness…that Brad Childress gives me as a head coach.

To be fair, Childress has done some good things as coach of the Vikings. The talent he has brought to the defense is flat out impressive. Granted, he gets help from the college scouting department and ownership when he wants to get a guy like Jared Allen, but he still went out and had to convince them to be a Viking. His methodical plan to get the Vikings back to one of the elite teams in the NFL started with an overhaul of the offensive and defensive lines, and he has done that. The second thing he did was commit to a strong running game. With the free agent acquisition of Chester Taylor and the drafting of Adrian Peterson, that can be checked off as accomplished. The Vikings have improved each year under Childress, and are a legitimate Super Bowl contender entering 2009.

But where Childress seems to lack is in his handling, or mishandling, of personnel. In 2006, Marcus Robinson, who was arguably the best red zone option on a team that thought offensive touchdowns a luxury, found himself given a pink slip on Christmas Eve. He wasn’t injured, he was a starting wide receiver, but he popped off to the St Paul Pioneer press at the end of a frustrating season and was sent walking.

On the day before Christmas. Nice. Ho, ho, ho, Marcus. Now pack your shit.

And there are other guys as well that have been done wrong by Childress and the Vikings. Matt Birk was not offered a chance to retire as a Viking and is now in Baltimore. But before that, he went to Harvard. Daunte Culpepper and Brad Childress got into it about 11 seconds after Chilly's introductory press conference, and he was shipped off to Miami for the draft pick that eventually became Ryan Cook. He invested a lot of time and effort into Tarvaris Jackson as his quarterback, tried to further upgrade the depth by trading for a solid backup in Sage Rosenfels...and then pretty much both told them without telling them they sucked when he wooed Brett Favre. Yesterday, Bobby Wade took a 50% pay cut for catching 105 passes the last two years and being a pretty decent slot guy. Today, he's unemployed.

I'm no longer a kid, and I understand that football is a business, and you can make a legitimate argument that the Vikings needed to get younger on the offensive line, and that there might have been legitimate reasons for releasing Wade. But there's a way to go about letting people go, and then there's what Childress and the Vikings have done to some fairly high profile guys since 2006. Football is about building team chemistry and asking guys to suffer and bleed and buy what you're selling, so as a group you can achieve great things.

So when you ask a guy to take a pay cut and then turn around and cut him the week before the season begins, what message does that send? If the coach doesn't have their back, wiill they cover his? I doubt it.