Is Jay too soft? Short answer, no.
Softness of a coach shouldn't matter as long as they're executing based on it. People reference Gibbs and how he was 'soft' but the players respected him. He also had an absolute PITBULL as an O-line coach in Joe Bugel. Over the last 2 preseason games, it's very clear our STARTING Defense is ahead of our STARTING Offense when it comes to level of play.. I wonder how much of this has to do with Tomsula being in the defensive practices every day, and how 'hard' he is on his guys. Personally I feel like it's the position coaches responsibility to dictate how 'hard' the practices are, and the coach needs to manage, not motivate.
The other major part of this 'softness' is leadership. On defense we have 'dogs' as (I believe) Doc Walker refers to them. Guys with nastiness, Swearinger, Norman, guys that lead the guys to being 'hard.' On offense, we have a couple guys but one of our captains cant quit smokin weed, and the other is someone who has found the book on the definition of PC (Kirk). If you look at the previous Gibbs teams, there were player leaders that held the team accountable for how hard they pushed and how bad they 'wanted it.' I still remember the story about the O-line looking at Randy White and telling him that we were gonna run his ass over, and then did it, and that didn't come from Gibbs. That's 'want-to' as I like to put it. I dont see that with this team, I'm hoping Scherff can have some of that in him and as he develops, he pushes the guys a little more.