Dailey Not a Firebird? Possibility Looms for 2004
Matthew Pickut
Wednesday June 4, 2003
“Why do I sing the Blues?” – B.B. King. If you don’t like B.B. you just ain’t American. And if you don’t think a losing season is reason enough for singing the blues, you just ain’t payin’ attention.
“We’re in the process of reevaluating the whole team. There are a number of guys on the squad this past season we’re looking at trying to get back next year, but I don’t want to get into specifics,” said General Manager Joe Hennessy. “Needless to say we had 13 free agents this year and I’ll be honest and tell you that we are re-evaluating guys. We’re not used to going 6-10 or 9-7 like last year – but I think there is a nucleus of guys here that I really believe… I mean three or four guys, that I want to start to rebuild from. That we think, as an organization, that we think can be the cornerstone of our future success. There is always a question as to whether you break things too quick or too late. We won the championship in 99 – we have the tendency to think that we probably waited a year too long to move forward, to make changes. Because if you’re not moving forward you’re moving back.
“There are three or four guys on the roster who we’ll build around. And they’re not necessarily guys who have been on the roster for a long time,” continued Hennessy. “Rebuilding is a good word for it, maybe even a little more aggressive. We want to make the moves necessary to next year put us in a position to get into the playoffs and certainly every year you want to try and win a championship. And for two years in a row we fell well short of that. In my mind we need to dramatically change the face of this football team.”
Furthering the team’s difficulties is the way the AFL salary cap is structured as a hard cap. Indiana will be playing with less money for salaries this year. “A lot of the money that went to IR [last year] is prorated over a three-year period and it will change your averages of what actually goes against our cap,” says Hennessy. “The injuries we had this year, especially the major ones with the players making a lot of money, will have a long-term negative effect on the salary cap.”
“Should I Stay or Should I Go?” – a little Combat Rock for you Clash fans out there. Rumors abound about who will coach the Firebirds’ next year. “Right now I’m the Firebirds’ head coach,” says head coach Mike Dailey. “There is nothing real serious transpiring right now, but you have to wait and see what happens. My intention is to coach the Firebirds, but if something else came along, I’d have to take a look at it.”
That kind of wait and see attitude is matched by Hennessy. “Coach Dailey and I have been co-workers and friends for a decade. He’s my friend as well as the head coach and if there is a situation that would come up for Coach Dailey where it would seem like in his mind it was a better situation then it was here, then I would probably do everything that I could to give him an opportunity,” said Hennessy about Dailey. “But I will tell you as a general manager I am also paying attention to other opportunities that are out there for the Firebirds. We’re not just going to sit back and let Coach take a job and be left holding the bag.
“I am contemplating options even as he is contemplating options and I would not ever try and hold him back from pursuing anything that he thinks will benefit himself and his family,” continues Hennessy. “And I’ll say the same thing for the organization. That even though Coach and I are friends and there is loyalty there, and I believe he is a fantastic coach, I would never not think about the organization first. So I would say that the respect for each other is mutual and that is how we are respecting. Certainly in our organization, we’ve been like a family for years and years and although it’s certainly business and will always be business first, because it has to be.”
“Could you be love?” Bob Marley and the Wailers’ ask the question and we answer. In a 6-10 season, what could it have been if everyone stayed healthy? Dailey knows that the Firebirds have a great team if they can stay healthy.
Ask what line he would have liked to have for the entire season and Dailey replied, “The three that started the season: Bech, Brown, and Blackwell. Having all those guys healthy and then Evan Hlavacek with his speed, and Jeremy McDaniel came in a did a great job.” Still, the job of keeping these players and looking for new ones has already started. “We have to look at our overall team, position by position. We have a lot of free agents and we have to look at who’s coming back.”
Even with the tempestuous season behind him, Dailey remains upbeat about the 2003 campaign. “Regrets are not something… well, it’s not a good word; it’s not one that I use very often. Certainly there are times that are opportunities for growth, times where you don’t achieve what you want, but you try and stay positive. You take every opportunity to learn and hopefully you move ahead. I don’t think in life or in anything you should have regrets,” says Dailey, whose team will potentially have many opportunities for growth looking back at this season.
“Have I told you lately that I love you?” – We’ll close out this set with the soulful question of Van Morrison, ‘cause deep down, “All You Need is Love”… well, and a profitable season. This year the Firebirds will have to settle just for the love of the biggest crowds in AFL Indiana history.
“We lost money this year, but that’s not abnormal for professional sports teams or the Arena Football League, but we’re going to make every effort to be fiscally responsible in 2004 and I’m going to try and be sure that we don’t lose as much money next year,” said Hennessy. “Hopefully we’ll be a lean mean fighting machine next year with a combination of increasing revenues and decreasing expenses. And it’s a fine line but you have to do both to make this thing make sense.”
More than six wins would help too, but until then, the love of their fans will have to do.
Matthew Pickut is a pastor in northern Indiana and a long time AFL fan. He also writes for his own website: The Brown Paper Blog. He graduated from Taylor University in Upland Indiana (class of `96) with degrees in Biblical Literature and Sociology as well as a healthy respect for the medicinal properties of coffee.
