CHILLY SAYS EDWARDS SHOULDN’T BE FINED

Vikings coach Brad Childress believes that defensive end Ray Edwards shouldn’t be fined for his hit on Bucs quarterback Jeff Garcia, which came roughly three steps after Garcia had thrown the ball. Childress also thinks that Garcia should have been flagged for intentional grounding on the play. “I know that Garcia had run around there, so everybody was in kind of a chase mode,” Childress said Monday. “My general thought on that is when you slow things down and look at it on HDTV, football is a full-speed game. It happens at full speed, and you’re trying to make snap judgments at full speed. “On that particular play, [Garcia] had come back into the pocket. I actually felt like that was intentional grounding. If you look at exactly where it happened, it happened right between the hash marks and the ball was thrown out of the back of the end zone to try and avoid a sack, in my estimate. Ray is trying to make estimations too, in terms of, ‘Is the guy going to run some more?’ “Again, the flag went down and it was a personal foul. But I think you get a different sensation when you look at it in regular speed. I look at it on my coaches’ copy.” At the risk of being one of those guys who come out of the mountains to shoot the wounded, a lineman’s belief as to whether a quarterback still has the ball is a pretty flimsy basis on which to avoid a roughing the passer call. Heck, anyone could use it. “I hit the guy ten seconds after he threw the pass? Well, I thought he still had the ball.” (Actually, we think we’ve now figured out why Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb didn’t know that NFL games could end in a tie. Chilly, after all, was the offensive coordinator in Philly from 2002 through 2005.) That said, we think this is an attempt by Childress to persuade the powers-that-be not to suspend Edwards -- and/or not to begin asking tough questions as to whether Childress and his staff are coaching defensive linemen like Edwards and Jared Allen to hurt opposing quarterbacks. Really, with the size and quickness of these players, any NFL coach could teach his players to try to injure the other team’s quarterback, and then hide behind vague concepts like “the speed of the game” when the poo hits the fan.