There was some discussion as to why someone with so many hours was FO, and the phrase "command failure" was bandied around. The article claims he was, in fact, a captain, called in to fill an FO's shift.
If you read back to the relevant posts you'll see
why it's postulated that his being a captain might have been part of the CRM problem (if there was a CRM problem - it looks that way right now, but we don't have CVR yet).