Choice of Castillo not wrong - yet

Jim Johnson, the great defensive innovator and coordinator for the Eagles, was a quarterback in college and, briefly, a tight end in professional football.

He started his coaching career as the head coach at Missouri Southern and, when the time came to move up the ladder a little bit, the job he found was on the other side of the ball, as defensive coordinator for Drake University in 1969. Once there, he never crossed the line of scrimmage again.

The point of that dusty story is obvious. Good coaches can coach. Their expertise is in teaching and presenting concepts to the players in ways they can understand. It is to get them to work hard enough to have the teaching pay off.

There are many things you can say about Andy Reid's decision to make Juan Castillo, the team's offensive line coach since 1998, the new defensive coordinator.

You can say that it is another example of Reid's being too infatuated with the football organization he has built and its schemes, and too aligned with the people he has kept around him. If there was a failing in promoting Sean McDermott to replace Johnson, that was the failing.

You can also say that Reid led a whole bunch of defensive coaches around the NFL on a merry chase for the last few weeks and some of them have the right to feel used by the process.

You can say that Reid, who only promoted Castillo when he was also able to hire legendary offensive line coach Howard Mudd, might have his football priorities a little out of order. Reid, an old offensive lineman, loves that part of the game, but if Castillo was really the best man for the defensive coordinator job, that should have trumped the concern about finding his replacement. (It also says Reid is putting a lot of weight on a 68-year-old previously retired offensive line coach. But that's next week's story.)

You can say all of that, and maybe a few things more, but you cannot say it is the wrong move, and you cannot say it won't work just because it looks different.

Time will tell us how it works, and Andy Reid is not acting like a head coach who thinks he is short on time. If he felt insecure about his job, he would have done the standard thing. He would have brought in one of those highly-touted position coaches from one of the defenses playing in Sunday's Super Bowl. It would have been an unassailable move - and heaven knows all of them seemed eager to get the job.

The news conference would have been seamless and the new guy - by the name of Ray Darren Keith Butler Horton - would have talked about playing hard and creating havoc and carrying on the aggressive defensive tradition of Jim Johnson. You know, the former quarterback and tight end.

Reid didn't do that. He took the former linebacker who was his offensive line coach, the guy who always said he wanted to get back on the defensive side, and made him the coordinator.

"It's a game of risks," Reid said. "From Day 1, he let me know he's a defensive coach. Every year I knew what his desire was. I watched good defensive coaches, including Jim Johnson, wander into Juan's office to talk about defense. They'd work on design schemes and packages."

Reid told it well Wednesday night at the NovaCare Complex and Castillo sold his vision of a defense that is "fast, physical and fundamentally sound." There is more to coaching than coming up with catchy alliterations and more to winning than desire, but he didn't sound any different than one of those Super Bowl coaches would have sounded.

After the news conference, Castillo spent another 15 minutes in the hallway talking about how his offensive experience will pay off as the defensive coordinator.

"I know how an offensive line is going to block a certain blitz. I know how it is going to block a certain front. I can teach that when you see the offense doing this, then that will happen," Castillo said. "I want to be a special defensive coordinator, and I will be because I understand offense. I always said, if I got on that side how dangerous would I be?"

Well, we'll find out. The season is a long way away, if they decide to play it, and the makeup of the defensive roster is unknown. The group that was on the field to finish last season wasn't very talented, regardless of what Reid might say. Castillo might be very good, but he can't teach tabbies to leap through a ring of fire.

"I felt this was the right decision at the right time," Reid said. "I take my time making decisions. That's what I do."

He also doesn't much care what people think of his decisions. If he did, Juan Castillo would still be the line coach. Instead, Castillo is the defensive coordinator. It's an unorthodox move, but it isn't the wrong one. Not just yet.