LeSean McCoy does not believe Eric Bieniemy’s aggressive approach works with the modern athlete.
Bieniemy has been in the news this week, as his demeanor in his first year as offensive coordinator of the Commanders led some players to express their concern to head coach Ron Rivera.
McCoy and Bieniemy overlapped on the 2019 Chiefs, so Colin Cowherd asked the former running back his thoughts on the storyline on “The Herd” on FS1 on Wednesday.
“I think he’ll be a good head coach because he’s good on the discipline and holding everyone accountable, but I’ve never seen him as a coordinator — he never really called plays, never installed plays, but the thing that alarmed me the most was the relationships with the players,” McCoy said of Bieniemy.
McCoy said that Andy Reid is great at X’s and O’s, but his real strength is that he can “relate” to players and “adjust” with the times.
“With Bieniemy, he’s still stuck in that old back in the days, where the coach is cussing people out. It’s not how it’s played nowadays,” McCoy said.
“Even with Coach Rivera talking about it, he said it’s a different approach. I was part of that Kansas City Chiefs championship team. It was terrible! One of the first things I noticed was how he talks to the players. It was like You can’t talk to these players [like that].
“If you notice, all the players he has issues with, fights with, arguments on the sidelines … if you notice when the players speak of Eric Bieniemy, they say He’s a really good coach. He’s disciplined. He cares. He has your back. They don’t say nothing about how he’s teaching them, how he’s making them better. Because he didn’t do a lot of that, when I was with him I didn’t see a lot of that.”
McCoy then brought the conversation back to the Commanders.
“Rivera spoke about the players who were coming up to talk to him. These ain’t third-string guys. These ain’t second-string guys. These are starters,” he said.
“When you start ripping players and cussing them out, you’re not gonna get the best out of them. I think he doesn’t realize that times have changed.”
McCoy previously cited Bieniemy’s intense demeanor as “the reason” why the coordinator has come up short in his quest to become a head coach.
“There’s a reason why every year they keep hyping him up to get a head coaching job, or an offensive coordinator job somewhere else, and he don’t get one,” McCoy said last May on the “I Am Athlete” podcast.
“He talks to players a certain way, and some players would take it. I wouldn’t take it. There’s some questions I’m gonna ask. Everyone’s accountable.
“It’s not because he’s a black coach [that he’s not getting hired]. That’s not the reason.”