Biggest takeaways from Bill Callahan’s first press conference as Redskins interim head coach

Non-committal about the team culture

Callahan was asked about the team culture, something that was expected after Bruce Allen called the culture “damn good” in his earlier press conference.

Callahan’s assessment was far less rosy. Here’s what he said when asked about the culture of the team and how it might change.

“We have a young core nucleus of players who have contributed to our team,” Callahan said. “It’s unfortunate that they haven’t experienced success like our veterans have. The culture and the environment is, on a day-to-day basis, setting the tone through our leadership.

“Our culture is one of working harder, being more prepared, being more focused, improving on a daily basis, improving fundamental techniques, improving when you go into a meeting, when you go on the field, when you’re in a competitive environment or a competitive drill, those improvements need to take place. And we need to have more of that.

“The culture of defining exactly what we wanna be and where we wanna go — again, it’s going to have to happen this week and it’s going to be piecemeal as we go through the Miami preparation. But that culture is always changing.”

That doesn’t sound like a statement from a man who’s confident in his team’s culture. It seems that he’s making a statement about what the culture should be, but the acknowledgment that the team needs to improve on it would indicate that the mentioned “culture” is just a broad idea. It’s not yet in practice.

Moving forward, it seems that Callahan will try to instill his own culture, but as many Redskins fans suspected, the culture isn’t nearly as good as Bruce Allen thinks it is. And in fact, it may be non-existent.

We’ll soon see if Callahan can successfully build a culture or if the team continues to have issues. But either way, it doesn’t seem that he’s happy with the status quo.