The Athletic Football Show: A show about the NFL - Mailbag: How to study defense, building the ultimate D coordinator, competence vs. competitiveness, Eagles & Colts plans & more

Episode Date: May 24, 2022

Our own defensive guru Diante Lee is this week's Mailbag guest as he answers YOUR emails and voicemails regarding how to learn about defense by watching tape, building the ultimate Frankenstein defensive coordinator, the value of competing for a championship vs. rebuilding, plans for the Eagles and Colts and more with host Robert Mays. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is the athletic football show. Welcome to the athletic football show. Today's Tuesday, May 24th. I'm Robert Mays. Joining me today, the Athletic Zone, DeAte Elite. DeAte, how you doing, man? Good, man. I feel like we've been kind of chasing our tail

with trying to get me back on for the last couple of weeks. You know, I know that life happens and it overcomes sometimes, but glad to finally be on and to be able to talk ball with you again, especially post-draft. we were going to do something something about defensive lessons what we learned watching some good defenses and then my air conditioning went out so it did not have a place to sit and watch film which would have made that show a little hard to pull off now i'm going on vacation there's a lot of moving parts this time of the year but it was important for me to get you on quickly and often this summer and i figured why not just do a mailbag so we're doing a mailbag again this week like we are all every week this summer i loved how people reacted when I gave them the prompt because I told people and they listened. Again, thank you to everyone who sent questions and they were all very, very good. They listened.

I said, Deonté-I-Zan, just asked some nerdy defense shit and really use him as a resource here. People obliged. We got a ton of good questions. We got so many good questions for this show. There's zero way we could ever answer all of them. So you're going to have to come on again at some point in June or July. We'll have to do this again if that's okay with you. if you don't hate this process.

I mean, you're pulling my arm here, but I guess I'll come back around. All right. So we have a ton of stuff to get into here. So let's just start with it. First one from Paul Banks. I love this one. It says,

Deyante, a secret mission for you. If you choose to accept it, you've just been given unlimited resources, the brains of all 32 defensive coordinators in the NFL, and a blank slate of a brain, with which to matrix style download all the best schemes and play-calling personalities.

How would you construct your ultimate defensive coordinator. This could be any way you decide to break it up. I just want to know what you think would be the best. Also, it has to be a realistic NFL defense that someone can run. We're not talking about a team full of 11 Aaron Donalds. I love shit like this. These stupid weird questions are great.

So the way that I took this question, I don't know how you thought about it was, if you could kind of put together the best attributes or schematic details, whatever, of a set of defensive minds in the NFL, what would that look like for you? good because that's that's basically the same way that I looked at it too. So I kind of broke it up into three different segments, which is personnel usage, defensive structure, and then play calling

kind of tendencies. So with personnel usage, like, I still think that that begins and ends with Bill Belichick. And you think about all the different ways that he's employed players. You know, you think about Adrian Phillips and his time there as a big nickel all the way to be in the middle of field safety. You know, Dante High Tower, Jamie Collins, like the list goes on and on and a lot of those guys at the second level being able to go from being a stacked linebacker on one snap to being on the edge on another. I think that, you know, that kind of speaks to his ability or his willingness to do whatever it takes to take away an offense's best thing.

From there, I kind of went to defensive structure and I chose Brandon Staley, mostly because Big Fangio is not an active NFL coach right now, but you can kind of take one or the other, you know, or anybody really off of that tree. But it's about like that commitment's of philosophy, right? Like we want to play with outside linebackers that are nine techniques of control the edge. Like that's where everything starts. You know, anytime I, you know, listen to or talk to Staley and some of the things I've heard from big fan, Gio, Ed Donatel, guys who are off that tree, a lot of their conversation always

seems to come back to what they want out of their outside linebackers and what that allows them to do defensively, you know, just along the edges of the defense period, whether it's outside back or corner, et cetera, et cetera, like that, that is a big piece of their defense. I think that. And I've talked with, when I talked with Brandon Staley, when I worked at Pro Football Focus, that was something that he really harped on was we knew we needed to get Khalil Mack because we could not run our defense without him. And when I asked him what he meant by that, he was talking about being able to control those alleys, like that C gap area inside of the tight end or around the tight end. And what he was breaking down is something that I've continued to learn as I study the three, four defense that we see so much in the NFL. And it's about being able to keep those safeties deep, right, and out of the run fit.

So that way you can take away the play action game. You can take away the RPO game. You can take away those intermediate passes, you know, whether it's an overrout, a dig route, like you and a native talked about, you know, ad nauseum. And Seth and I talked about when I was at pro football focus. That's where it kind of starts with is the more control you have over the edge, especially at the first level, the less you have to ask of your safety is to get involved in the run fit. And that just adds to what you can do in terms of being multiple in your coverages.

So that's kind of where that comes from. think about that alley, right? That alley right there where you feel, you can just see a safety coming down into that alley. If you don't have to have a safety, be responsible for that alley, even though where he lines up and where he ends up there is a very long distance, it just changes the way you can structure what you're trying to do on defense. Exactly. And I think of an awful, like the best offense at attacking it is Kyle Shanahan. Right. Like I can close my eyes and just picture Rahim Moster just running right behind George Kittle and just killing teams over and over and you know, and that's for a reason, right? Because you want to create that bind for

a defense. You want them to have to choose what they want to do with their safety and then be able to punish them for that decision. So I like the fact that Brandon Staley, Vic Fangio, guys off that tree are committed in that way to being able to keep two safety deep whenever they can and allowing or asking their outside linebackers to really control that CGap alley. So that's what I would take structurally. And then in terms of a, I'll go ahead. It's just so interesting that because I think it's so tempting and we all fall into this and I know I'm guilty of it. When we're talking about what this shift has looked like. It's always about too high, too high safeties. It's always about what the coverage structures look like. And just that example of how the coverage and the front tied together

in a way that I think a lot of people who are just watching football or even thinking about it at a fairly high level, they would make that connection as to why that becomes possible. And as we continue to just get more comfortable conversationally about the idea of this type of defense, I think it's really important to keep harping on this stuff. is it's not just what the back end looks like. It's how the back end on the front end tie together and ultimately what that ends up meaning. And I'm sure we'll get into that a million different times between now and when the season starts. But I think it's an important thing to point out because I know I don't think about it nearly often enough.

Well, it's just funny because it leaves itself into every conversation about football, right? Like as you talk about the scheme, like what you ultimately end up talking about and you and I have discussed this is the body types you look for. And then what you're talking about body types and athletic profiles, now that weaves itself into the draft, into free agency, in a trade value, you know, how much you pay guys on extensions, whether you keep them at all, who gets to work into rotations, et cetera, et cetera. So like, just the influence of that alone, you know, has this cascading effect, not just on what we talk about schematically, but how valuable we consider one player, you know, in comparison to another or one scheme in comparison to another. So yeah, like that three four stuff versus four three, which is something I talked about with Pete Carroll, right? I kind of find him to be a really fascinating guy to examine under this context because he was, you know, the godfather of one style of defense for what seemed like a decade. And now it seems like that everything, now that everything is kind of moving away from that to watch him have to try to adjust to another life in football, I think has been really fascinating and tells a really interesting story of where the NFL is at. we will talk way more about that in the coming months because I think we have a few things,

few conversations lingering on the horizon. And one, it really has to be about what this dailyification of the NFL ultimately looked like and then what it will continue to look like because we saw the adoptions, right? There are teams that started doing it, you know, teams that aren't even directly off that tree that started doing it. And now you have people way off that tree who in some ways have they've grabbed, coaches that have done that. Sean Desai is now in Seattle. Carl Scott is now in Seattle. So Clint Hart is there and he has experience in that in that world. And so that makes sense. You

grab people who understand it. But there are defensive coordinators and coaches that I've talked to that they don't even come from that place. And they're like, oh yeah, we're going to start doing some of that stuff. Absolutely. And it just, it's watching that movement, I think, is going to be, again, for the second year in a row, a pretty big storyline about how NFL defense has played. So we will talk a lot about the Seahawks as a microcosm of that over the coming months, I'm sure. Absolutely. Absolutely. And then to finish what Paul, the last factor I had in terms of play calling would be a combination of like Domeyko

Ryan's, Rahim Morris, and Joe Barry. And when I think about those guys, what they all are committed to and this kind of ties to what I was talking about with Staley is being able to play zone coverage, match in zone coverage, you know, take away those intermediate passing windows. And all three of them kind of go about it differently. like Joe Barry to me and I think the Packers, as well as the bills, are probably my two favorite teams to watch in coverage last year. But you watch the way that they play quarters and their corners are pressed and safety years are coming flying out of the roof to take away digs and overrouts. And you can just see a quarterback patting the ball, patting the ball going from one, two, to three, in the progression.

Oh, against, you know, 28 other teams in the NFL, by the time I would have got to, you know, this spot in my progression, something would have broken open. But here comes Adrian Amos, right, to rob a dig. or rob a curl or something to that effect or that overrout that I'm used to being open now isn't there and what do I do? And you think about that, you know, also in the context of a Rahim Morris and Domeyko Ryans, and that gets back to why the front and coverage, you know, the relationship between them is so interesting because as this quarterback is patting the ball, now your elite pass rushers can get home, you know, and I think that that is a big piece of that as well. So as we continue to talk about these two high coverages and trying to force a quarterback to come

off of some of these more vertical throws, that's where pass rush in this era of football is going to be more and more valuable, is late in a down, late in the progression. We're not going to see, I think, as much early pressure. But I think that, you know, the more you can get guys to kind of crush pockets and move guys off platform, that interplay with that and being able to get a quarterback to have to move his eyes and his shoulders in the progression, that's extremely valuable right now. And I think that those three probably do the best job of it. It's really interesting because I have definitely come around more to the idea of the importance of pocket pushers, the importance of guys that just bring a certain physicality out front more than the true

bendy edge rushers or penetrators inside. But the Niners in just that style, they accomplish both at the same time. They have penetrators, but the guys are so dominant that the pocket collapses instantly. Like the way that they can play the run, they're not two gaping and playing gap and a half and that style in the same way some of these other defenses are. But the guys are so disruptive that it ultimately becomes. a similar sort of effect when it's all said and done. A coach told me that last week, you're like, yeah, you know, some of that stuff is the

Niners don't do that, but it's the same thing. Like you're worried about the same sort of thing as it relates to running the ball against them because they're so dominant in the way that they play that style. And the Jets are obviously trying to do the same thing with the personnel that they've assembled there. Right. And even Dennis Allen, who isn't off of that, you know, who didn't coach there, I think does something very similar in New Orleans with playing that four or three, too high safety.

and you just watch teams hand the ball off. And I think I talked about it with San Francisco, and I think this applies to New Orleans as well. It looks like a track meet with defensive linemen and linebackers. Get into the line of scrimmage. Like, these guys come flying to fit their gaps. And it's a necessary thing, right? And I think that, you know, for as much as people might roll their eyes

and you hear all the coaching platitudes about effort, you know, and technique and execution, a lot of that stuff really applies. Like when you're watching an Eric Armstead, who can take his 6'4-7, almost 300-pound frame, and crush a pocket. or take away a B gap and an A gap just off of size and effort. That kind of stuff adds a lot of value to what you want to do on the back end

and what you want to do with your linebackers. And I think that it speaks to why a lot of these defenses are so great against play action and vertical passes because they don't have to invest as much of their resources to stop the run because of what they do up front. Even it's the Eric Arf said an example is great because even if the technique he's playing isn't playing the A and the B at the same time, he's kicking so much. that he's put in the right guard back in the A gap. So he is playing two gaps at the same time in the end.

All right. Let's get to our next one here. James Anderson says, I am a Detroit Lions fan from New Zealand. I've been following the team since 2009. I hope you'll bear with me here. The changing perception of this Lions team reminds me of the decade-long transformation

of the New Zealand national cricket team from possibly one of the worst to play the sport at an international level to one of the best. Crucially, the team decided that winning was less important than not embarrassing an entire nation of people. They decided to put it in an unheard of effort and be relentlessly attacking. Dan Campbell's fourth down attempts, perhaps,

because that's what they thought their fans actually wanted. Wins were secondary. They peaked as the number one team in the world in 2021. Comparing this to the development of a football team, is it possible just focusing on winning the Super Bowl is detrimental to the long-term product you're providing as a professional sports team? Maybe committing to high-energy attacking football on letting the chips fall where they may

is a better recipe for long-term enjoyment of the fans than constantly rebuilding towards such a singular goal. Thoughts? I love this question. And I think that in the end, this is about culture, right? This is about the human element of how you rebuild the team and how you ultimately get to that goal. And I think there's a lot to chew on here. But as somebody who has coached, has been around teams, is understanding how they function and even who watches the NFL the way that you do, what is your reaction to a question like that?

So this one kind of floored me for a second. I really had to kind of sit and ruminate on how I wanted to approach it. And I think the first thing that I walked away with is, not. that it's a mistake, but I think it will be misdirected to view those two things as a binary. I don't see them as a binary matter of choosing winning, you know, or it's not winning versus culture, right? The way that I really internalize that information that he gave me the context of that New Zealand cricket team was that they decided that an identity was more fundamental to building buy-in, not only with players but with fans, and that that would be the best runway to get short-term success. So I do find that fascinating when you tie that into Dan Campbell in Detroit, right? Because that's exactly what I would say their 2021 was.

We have an identity. We might get our ass kicked with this identity, but we're going to run this thing into the ground. And I think that you saw the buy-in, you know, pretty early in the season. Even as, you know, it seemed like, you know, any other franchise might have let go of the rope a little bit. I think that that commitment to identity is how you're able to find those shirt term successes where we hit the offseason. And I've heard it from you. I've heard it from a lot of other people that I really respect in football media that don't really have anything negative to say about what the lion's season was. I think that everybody can identify what they were trying to do and some of the short-term successes and development that you get out of players.

And that, to me, is a key piece. Throughout identity and getting that buy-in gives you a framework to develop players that you already have on roster. And that is how you get to eventual long-term success. I think that ultimately, though, what makes it complicated in the NFL is that runways are just short. Like, it's hard to draw to draw a one-to-one comparison between, hey, we have an identity for a national team where we get however long that I'm here as the, you know, the guy running this and bringing players in and our coaches, et cetera, et cetera. Your football tenure as a GM and head coach can change, you know, at the drop of a hat. You know, a quarterback doesn't work out or somebody blows an ACL and that derails what would have been a. promising season. And now you have questions to answer, right? So that to me is what makes it a little

bit murky in a football context. But I was actually talking about this, talking about this with a few of my colleagues in the media. And one of the things that I just continue to harp on is I think people talk about value and value and value is that the only thing that I know to work in the football world in terms of winning is having very, very, very good players. That is one thing that I know that works above everything else. And that's really kind of. of the context that I'm always looking at things from. I understand some of the conversations that are had about contract value and can you get this guy at this point in your window, et cetera, et cetera. But you just want to have good players and then you hope that your good

players outperform their contract value. That's it. Like that is the recipe. That's the only one I know that works year over year over year. So I think that that's really what you have to focus on. And then if you have an identity and a culture that you're feeding these good players into, it makes it more likely that they outperform their contract value. So that's just the way that I kind of look at it. I think that's totally fair. The way that I see this and the way that I was thinking about the question is, when is it worth taking a step back or when is it worth not maximizing value in efficiency?

You make a minus EV move in pursuit of something bigger down the road. There are a couple examples that jump out to me, the Falcons last year. Yeah. I think they understood that holding out to Matt Ryan and some of the decisions they made financially weren't necessarily the best. You tear it down immediately if you could. And I know the trading his contract was tough. I think there was some desire to build up some morale within the building. Win a couple games.

Don't be terrible right away. Even if that not isn't in a vacuum, the way you would do it, I understand the thinking. talking about the lions. The lions did not need to pay Jared Gough 30 million dollars this year to be what the lions want to be. They could pay a quarterback half that. Any algorithm you run it through on like an Excel spreadsheet will probably tell you that that's one of the worst decisions you can make for where the franchise is at, right? Yes. And in my brain, when I see that, especially last year, even when they traded for them, I asked Brad Holmes this on this podcast.

Like, why would you want to do that? That's a lot to pay a quarterback when you're not trying to win any game. and I'm sure they're looking at it saying, who gives a shit? We're not paying anybody else. Yeah, it's a lot of money. But there's such a value on us being competent offensively, to not being a train wreck, to having somebody in the building who has the right personality to be this bridge quarterback and isn't an asshole and all of these different things.

It's hard to put a value on that. They may be overpaying for that still. I'm sure they are if you were trying to figure out the exact dollars and sense of it. But those are the sorts of moves that I think from the outside when you're just trying to maximize value at every single turn and saying we are trying to get everything we can out of every single transaction in order to squeeze what we can out of it on the way to the Super Bowl. That's not always how it works because there are human aspects to this. And I think if you look at rebuilds in general, what the dolphins did, what the Browns did, where it is a total tear down on purpose. I, in the moment when those were happening, was very complimentary of the idea

because I hated the middle ground that so many NFL teams had run into. With Miami especially, I was like, this is great. You're a 7 and 9 team every year. Just do something to change the trajectory of who you are. And ultimately, for the dolphins, I think it worked out okay because they brought in a coach that was really able to establish an identity very early on.

Those teams played hard, even though they were absolute garbage. but as I've had more conversations with people around the league, I think that I've softened my stance on this because I don't appreciate or haven't appreciated just how difficult it is to be bad. It's really, really hard to be bad and to know you're going to be bad and to go to work knowing you're going to lose every single week. That seeps into everything else, everything. And having a way to try to navigate.

that middle space, even if you're transitioning from one error of your franchise to the other. The Ravens are the perfect example where the Ravens were never going to tear it down. And I've talked to analytics people about this. And even those analytics people at some of these franchises that never tore it down are like, you can't just tear it all the way down. You can't do it. Even if the value is there and even if it makes sense on paper and on a spreadsheet, you just can't do it.

And the Ravens got lucky to find an MVP-level quarterback with a 30-second pick. That doesn't always happen. but I think if you can try to stay competitive as often as possible, and you try to navigate those spaces, it can ultimately benefit you. And there are times where I'll talk, remember with Washington last year, Washington brought in Ryan Fitzpatrick.

And my question to people there was, what's the end game here? Like, are you a Super Bowl team with Ryan Fitzpatrick? And if you're not, why have a stopgap quarterback just in general? And the person I was talking to kind of pulled me back. I was like, you're thinking about it in way too scientific of a way. There is a benefit to try to be as good as you can be every single year. And I think you can debate some aspects of that.

I don't think just on its face that necessarily should be true. I think there's a way to kind of balance both of those factors. But I do think it's not nearly as black and white as I probably thought it was when I was 27 years old. That's what I would say about this. 100%. And I think even taking this out of like a football context, like this is a conversation all the time that I here in the NBA, right? Like, oh, you don't have a superstar that you can give a supermax contract to, you might as well tear it all down, right? And I see the merit in that conversation, but to your point, and I think that what we're both saying is kind of feeding each other, there just is value in building something consistently saying, hey, we took a step. It might not be the step. It might not be a big step. But we are continuing to take a step. And then when you think about the Ravens who

use as an example, I think the reason why you're able to maximize Omar Jackson and get an MVP season out of them is because you've been committed to building an infrastructure that maximizes every last piece of what you're trying to do day by day and year over year. So that way when you bring a guy in who's unorthodox in skill set, you can say, hey, no big deal. We figured this out before or we'll make the investment. If we don't have the answer right now, we're going to continue to chip away at this until we find a way to make this work. and then the player feels, you know, and this kind of gets into the human element thing, which is an intangible that we really won't have an ability to measure.

But being able to create those frameworks for players makes it more likely, in my opinion, that you do get extra return on your investment. Lamar Jackson can walk in and say, hey, this playbook is mine. It was made for me with me in mind. This is my thing. I can take ownership of it. I've heard you talk about this with Joe Lombardi and Drew Brees, right? And Drew Brees is a great player.

ready. But that kind of investment in, hey, we want this to be yours. And I want you to know that every offseason, our front office and coaching staff is doing everything that we can to frame this in a context that makes the most out of you in this franchise as well. And I think that that's why you're able to stay competitive year over year. Now, to me, the only thing that really needs to be a conversation out of that is, are you willing with being uncomfortable when it doesn't work out? Because that's where New Orleans is at now, right? You're going to run into a time. You're going to run into a time where it's not going to be as comfortable, where you're not going to have all the pieces, or where the roadmap is not as clear. But I think that the value in just trying to be competitive

and hang, like to your point, just like for me as I've grown up in this and tried to be more analytical and try to appreciate different perspectives, I think that now I am kind of circling back around like you to, there's just an inherent value to always trying to have something good, a good product to put on the field and trying to build that way. Because I think it's just too hard to try to thread the needle on, hey, we're going to tear this down and go get good cheap players everywhere or good young players everywhere. And everybody's timeline is going to be the same. And we'll have the coach, and we'll have the GM, and we'll have, you know, the cap space we need when we need it. I think that that's a, it's almost a dangerous way to look at it now. And I think that that's why a Jacksonville gets a lot of

concern. That's why a Chicago with Justin Fields gets a lot of concern because there's still a lot in the air. We don't know yet. It will be a little bit different if they were, you know, if these quarterbacks were entering into, hey, they just went seven and ten, and it wasn't the greatest. It was rough at different spots. But we think that, hey, if you take a step, maybe now you turn that into nine and eight and you're competitive and you can make a wild card. You know, I think that, you know, if you're a fan of Trevor Lawrence and Justin Fields, you've got to be looking at Jalen Hurts and thinking, man, it would be really nice to have

our quarterback in a context like that. Because at least we would have some clarity on whether or not this guy is good by the end of the season or more than we have right now. The quarterback question of this is something that I've been preoccupied with for a long time. When do you get them? How do you get them? Is it worth being a team that's picking 22nd overall and hope that you can do something like the Texans and the chiefs did? Where, you know what?

Maybe I have to beholder stuff. A guy falls out of the top 10. We can't make the move up for them the same way the Bears did with Justin Fields. Because I know it's easier to get a guy in the top three if you're picking in the top three. but just think of how many horror stories there have been with guys getting picked up there because the organizations they're going to and the surrounding talent and personnel and coaching is hot garbage. And every once in a while, you're going to have a couple guys that transcend whatever that happens to be.

You're going to have a Joe Burrow, even in his rookie year, while he was getting destroyed on a daily basis, we could see it. There was no need to rationalize it or talk yourself into what he was. Like that guy's just good, period, end of sentence. Justin Herbert, same way. Every once in a while, those guys are going to come around. Those transcendent guys are just good no matter what. But Trevor Lawrence is supposed to be one of those guys.

And that's not what happened because that's not often what happens. Those guys, we did the quarterback draft this week. And you think, oh, yeah, you know, there are so many of those guys. Just these guys that are, there's no gray area. He is one of the dudes. I'll be good if he's around. He's 25 years old. There's like three of those guys, like four.

That's it. There are not that many of those dudes. They do not come around that often. So the idea, and Jaylen Hertz is a great example of, all right, we're going to try to navigate this weird period where he's on a cheap deal and he gives us an ability to play offense a certain way where our floor is a little bit higher, but we don't know what our ceiling is and we're going to add all these pieces and maybe we're not a Super Bowl contender with him, but we're still going to be competitive.

And that is a, it's a murky thing. It's very complicated and very naughty. And I think the analogy you use, the metaphor you use, when you can't see the road, that's what it is. You don't know what's around the corner. But if you feel good about the way the car is built, it's a lot easier to say, you know what, we'll be okay. Like, I can't see around the bend, but I know that we're going to be safe. Like, this is a Volvo. We feel good about it.

I think that's kind of what you're looking at. And I do think that there is merit to that sort of approach, even if you were building it from scratch. that's not the way you would want to do it. But none of this stuff is done in perfect conditions. None of it. So, yeah, it's hell of a question. It is a hell of a question. There by James, which is spurting to sound like a 15-minute conversation.

Shout out to the New Zealand cricket team. I've said this before. I'll say this again. Our international listeners often give us some of the best questions. They're extremely thoughtful, and I appreciate every single one of you. All right. Kent, can we get to our first voicemail here? Speaking of the Eagles.

Hi, Robert and Diate. I love what both of you do. Thank you for answering my Eagles-related question. My question is, based on their personnel decisions over the last two years and the performance last season, what do you think the Eagles' defensive approach is and what they actually wants to run? It's unclear what Coach Cannon is trying to accomplish with the players he puts out there and the very vanilla scheme that he ran last year.

I wonder if you have an idea of what it is that he's trying to accomplish. This is all you, my friend, as a resident Eagles fan who will claim he's not an Eagles fan, as a chest pumps during the, just pounds his chest when they pick Jordan Davis and wore an amazing Eagles jacket on this show. Absolutely. I'm recovering Eagles fan as a way I'm praising it now. Okay. It's not, it's never just a clean, a clean process from A to Z. Some days I slip, some days I'm strong. Um, but to me, this is actually, it's great timing on this for me personally because I was

just, um, I was just talking with Fran Duffy who does Eagles X's and Nose. Um, and this week and then Bull Wolf, you know, I was talking to last week. Um, and I kind of threw the question at them before we started recording and they kind of gave the same answer that I had and what I've been looking at, which was like, I don't really know, you know, we're not sure. sure yet. But I think when I think about it, I actually kind of come back to this quote I got from Brandon Staley at the Combine, which is funny talking about him knowing his relationship with Jonathan Gannon, right? And what he said to me at the presser was that the big thing about playing NFL defense is that you do what you have to do, not what you want to do, right? And I thought that

that was a very poignant point to make. And I think that that's kind of where Gannon is at. One thing I will say about them schematically that the way they started the year, it was very clear that he walked in with an identity based on where he had been prior, right? We want to play softer zone coverage. We want to be able to live, you know, in this four-down world. You know, we're going to ask our linebackers to fit the run and do all the hard things, right? And I think that there's merit to that. And then I think he realized eight, nine weeks into the season, like, we don't have the horses for any of this. You know, we can't do this. It's not, it's not, it's not, it's not tenable. We can't stop the run. We can't, you know, we can't eliminate these vertical passes.

And then I think by the end of the year, you started to see more zone blitzes, start to see more cover zero blitzes. You started to just see a little bit more attacking, not because they have, you know, lockdown man-to-man guys, but because that was the best method for them to get the results that they wanted. And I think that from what I'm gathering as I kind of look at, you know, what news comes out of Philadelphia during the mini-camp circuit is that I think that he wants to be more committed to doing multiple things, right? being able to win multiple ways. So whether it's using more odd fronts, Jordan Davis obviously fits right into that. Being able to play more tight in coverage, you know, even in zone, I think a guy like Nacobi Dean who has a great athletic profile when he's healthy helps, you know, contribute to that as well.

And then being able to trust your corners to live in one-on-one situations so they can protect their safeties a little bit more. That's why you go out and get a James Bradbury, right, to play an opposite of Darius Slay. So I think that they just, they have more tools right now, I think, to be multiple. multiplicity, I think, is going to be the name of the game for them offensively and defensively, honestly. I think that they're going to try to attack this as many different ways as possible and not try to be, you know, so married to doing things one particular kind of way. Hassan Redick is another guy in that exact conversation where they had him and it's like, ooh,

you can do a lot of that. What is that? What does that mean? Because it's just, he's very different than the edge presences that we're used to with that team because we're so, I mean, for years and years and years, we just looked at them and it's like, oh, it's a Jim Schwartz team, it's a four-down team, like, that's how they play. And he is not in that mold at all. So it's just, it's one of those where you try to pick up a little breadcrumbs when teams do stuff.

It's like, what does that mean? What are they trying to be by doing that? And I think he's a perfect example. So you have him, you have Jordan Davis and just like, all right, maybe there's a little bit of a shift going on. You mentioned the more pressure numbers, and I wanted to throw this out because I thought it was really telling. They were 12th in Blitzrate over the second half of the season last year.

So, I mean, that's, they brought a lot more. more pressure. They played more man coverage down the stretch. That week nine against the Chargers game is where things flipped a little bit. And so I think they kind of, he came to that aha moment of this sucks. I can't do this way anymore. And when you are a first year defensive coordinator doing this job for the first time with players that you didn't necessarily pick, you walk into a situation that's already kind of half made, they have some expensive veterans, they've built this team in a very specific way, that plays defensive, very specific. specific way. That feeling out process is not always smooth. There's going to be some fits and

starts as it relates to that. And I think that we saw that with the Eagles. I cannot wait to see what they want to be and how they end up playing this year. Absolutely. I think that it's an instructive piece. You know, when you talk about coaches of you can only walk into a job with what you're armed with, right? What you've seen work in different spots. And leaving Indianapolis, he had no reason to think that he couldn't do what he did in Indianapolis someplace else. If that's where you enjoy success as a secondary coach before you become a coordinator. So it makes all the sense in the world to try that. And like you said, to get halfway through the season and be like, this doesn't look anything like what it looked like at the last place I was at. This hurts. We can't get off the field. I don't like this.

You know, all my good players are looking at me on the sideline. Like, I don't know what I'm doing. We have to make a different kind of adjustment to what we're doing defensively so that, you know, commitment to, hey, we need to send more pressure, especially on early downs. You know, I saw a lot of that with them on early downs in a way that didn't exist for them in the first half of the year. And I think that, you know, being able to use three down, four down, bare fronts, et cetera, et cetera. I think, and it's not just with them. This is just the NFL in general. The idea that you can only do, that you only need to do one thing to win in today's NFL, I think is kind of out. Like, I just don't believe that that is the context that we should

be looking at the rest of the NFL through anymore. That's not. We'll talk about Gus Bradley here in a second. So no worry about that. It's always a combination of how good of a coach you are and what sort of players you are. The two best examples recently of a defensive coordinator coming in in his first season having immediate success. Think of Brandon Staley in 2020 and Dan Quinn last year. Brandon Staley walked into a situation and it's impossible to argue with the plan they had, the structural ideas of what that defense looked like changed the NFL. It's not overstating. It changed the league what they did there. It's also pretty easy to understand when you walk into that scenario, I'm going to build my defense around 99 and 5.

And that's what it's going to look like and we'll figure the rest of the shit out later. And that's what it was. So you have good players and a good plan. In Dallas last year, Dan Quinn walks in there's like, 11's pretty good. So I'm going to use him in all of these different ways. And that he became a centerpiece for how they created the defense. So you need the creative aspect of who you are and you need the plan. But it helps to have really,

really dominant one-of-one type players that inform what that plan looks like. And now I think the Eagles have more of those types of players than they did a year ago. Absolutely. I mean, that's the name of it. We were just talking about in the last question, right? It is my belief, you got to have good players, especially on defense. You got to have good players on defense. There's just no way around it because defense naturally is going to turn more into one-on-one football than on the other end of the ball. You have to have guys that can win those one-on-one matchups to free you up to be able to play with the numbers advantage in other spots. So whether it's having a lockdown corner that allows you to roll a safety over the top

away from him. So that way you can really sit in those underneath intermediate areas, the way that we know what Brandon Staley likes to do or a Joe Barry or Vic Fangio, you know, the list goes on and on. Or if it's having, you know, a guy like Aaron Donald who has gravity up front and allows you to do different things. Or to your point with Dan Quinn and Michael Parsons, he has gravity now as a pass rusher that makes it easier on to Marcus Lawrence when he's healthy and the rest of the guys that they have and Randy Gregory, et cetera, et cetera on down the line. So I think that it is extremely important to be able to get the really good guys, those planet theory types, and to be able to build the rest of it off of there.

And I think that's exactly why you can look at Philadelphia see a six foot six, three hundred and 40 pound guy who runs a four. An actual planet. Right. Yes. And say, hey, getting that guy makes the other 10 players. is that he's standing next to a whole lot better, and we would rather have that than to go make maybe the greatest, you know,

value move with the mid, with the mid first round pick. All right. Let's get to our next one here. Pat Samani says, I'm a Ravens fan. He's very excited about them drafting Kyle Hamilton. So I thought about what would happen to Chuck Clark.

Ravens fans are legally obligated to ride or die for late round defenders. So I keep hearing about three safety looks, but I don't actually understand anything about NFL schemes until you and your guests explain them to me. So for you and Deante, could you explain what exactly a scheme could look like with those three guys on the field? Do you have a dream scenario for how they could all fit together? Think this applies to a lot of teams around the NFL right now. Two that jump out immediately to me based on the players they drafted, the Bengals and the Chargers.

Teams that we thought, they need another corner. And instead of going to get another corner in the draft, they go get guys who can be slot defenders, who can be third safety. So this is a question specifically about the Ravens, but I think, it's going to be a trend we see more and more. So specifically with Baltimore and I guess just three safety looks in general, how does it play out in practice? So to me, at the NFL level, at least I think about three safeties in two contexts.

And that's big nickel packages and true dime packages, right? So big nickel packages would just mean that instead of using a Sam linebacker like you would in base is that you use a third safety in that spot. So in the context of the Ravens, the way that I projected out is that you would take Kyle Hamilton and make him the quote unquote big nickel, right? Because he's six for 220 pounds. And you can play with, you know, Marcus Williams and Chuck Clark deep. And if you're doing that, you're probably dealing with those 11 personnel teams that like to get in the tight splits, run your outside zones or, you know, that want to give you spread looks to run kind of downhill

offense. You probably want to have somebody who can cover so that way you don't have a corner, well, you want a guy who can fit the run, excuse me, so you don't have a corner that's playing next to the line of scrimmage getting attacked, you know, in the run game. But you want a guy who's not a linebacker that has to walk out with the slot, right? So if you're a three, four defense, the way that I think they're going to be under Mike McDonald, you probably don't want the non-rush outside linebacker to have to split out, you know, with the slot receiver in today's NFL. Yeah, it's probably not a winning business model. So you may want to put, you know, a more athletic body there. And I think that that's kind of how that would look, you know, for the Ravens. And then with the dime package, you put

Chuck Clark in the box where he's been great before. He can match up with backs. You can put Hamilton and Williams deep. You can run your quarter stuff, cover one, your bracket looks, et cetera, et cetera. And I think that Clark being able to match up with backs while also having two plus starter level safeties, which I think they can get out of Hamilton and Williams and what we know Williams to be and what I think Hamilton can be. It allows you to do different things with guys like Patrick Queen.

Right. Now maybe he can be more of a pressure guy and use his athleticism to get after quarterbacks or play in the hole, you know, and play off of quarterback's intentions. You can do some different things in terms of designing your fronts where now I can get, you know, a bunch of speed guys up front and use a linebacker. Like I think about the second half of the Super Bowl where you start walking a linebacker up over a guard. So that way you can really guarantee that Aaron Donald gets on one-on-one. You can't slide protection in that way because you're actually willing to blitz that backer

every once in a while and make them honor it. So you can do those different types of things. So that's kind of the way that I think about three safeties in today's NFL and to your point about J.T. Woods being drafted by the Chargers and Brandon Staley coming out and saying, hey, we kind of like the idea of Durwin James playing closer to the line of scrimmage every once in a while. We think that that would kind of maximize who he is. I think that we're going to see more and more of that around the league. And I think that a lot of that is because of these 11 personnel looks that get in the tight splits and want to run downhill plays, you know,

at corners and force them to have to show up and run support and tackle. It's a great way to mitigate that. I just, I mean, Jordan Roderie, he's done such a great job with this. but really just another example of how Los Angeles is just an incubator for ideas because the Rams moving Jalen Ramsey to the slot and having him play that spot where you want a little bit more heft, a little bit more oomph from that guy than you do from somebody like Troy Hill or Darius Williams. Yeah, or Darius Williams, those five, nine corners is a direct response to more teams playing like the Rams do on offense because of a guy like, Cooper Cup being there. It's just this circle of life that is kind of concentrated in a lot of ways in the ways of the game has been pushed forward directly there. And then you apply it to the

AFC North. What is happening in Cincinnati? It's an offense that is derived at least in some ways from what the Rams did in L.A. Not the exact same. There's a lot of differences, but you still are 11 personnel team and just how does that influence the way the Ravens want to play and all this stuff goes on and on and on. It's why it's always fun to talk about. And we're doing this shit in May and having a good time doing it. All right. Next question. Riswan Khan says, when I watch

defenses in football, I get very confused and super overwhelmed and really would love to learn more about the schematics and get more analytical on defense. You and me both, man. Obviously listening to the athletic football show and reading up on Deontes' work has helped me. I was wondering, how can I become

more of an expert in learning defenses? What are the best resources and things I should read up on every day to learn more about defenses and get an in-depth breakdown? Any specific books or videos you would read or watch. I'm going to let you have this one because this is a world you live in. It is. And it's tough because I want to answer this with Coach Brain. And I feel like that would be a unfair, right? But what I would say is, and this actually works for me as a coach, which is why

I would still recommend it to somebody who's just a consumer of the sport. You have to shrink your focus first because everything that happens defensively is so structural. And we've been talking about the interplay between fronts and coverages, defensive line and linebackers, linebackers and safeties, et cetera, et cetera. So I would say pick a position group that you're really, really fascinated by, you know, whether it's defensive line, outside linebackers in a three, four, inside linebackers in a four, three, you know, safeties in quarters, and, you know, tie a position group to a scheme that you want to learn. So if you want to learn about what's happening in today's NFL, then it might be a good idea to learn about three, four outside linebackers,

you know, in a quarters coverage type of world. And then you're going to learn what it means to control the CGap Alley the way that we talked about. And as far as using resources to understand that, YouTube is honestly your greatest ally in this. There's a lot of like free clinics, you know, teach tape, et cetera, et cetera. I think about, you know, one of my good online friends bets, you know, who I don't know is if he's still around social media, but I remember talking with him about it a lot. And one of the things that I would always recommend to him is, hey, go look at, you know, he wanted someone about the 4-3. So I was like, hey, go look at Rod Marinelli tape in the 4-3 defense. You know, somebody who coached in Tampa Bay, who's coach in Dallas, you know, who's a legend, you know, in this sport.

Learn what that means not only to play that position in that style, but how that informs what a defense is able to do schematically. Because you'll learn, again, the layering effects. I'm a broken record when I talk about defense because a lot of this stuff really does carry over no matter what you're talking about schematically. So again, pick a position group, pick a scheme, tie the two together. And you can literally just type in those keywords on Google. or YouTube and you'll get reams of tape and clinics and different things that you can use as reference material. And as you learn that, you learn outside linebackers in a three, four, you are eventually going to learn what it means to be a four eye. You learn what it means to be a four eye. You're

going to learn what it means to be a nose. If you learn that, you're going to learn how to fit the run as inside linebackers. And then you can start working your way back and out. And then you can get a full picture out of that. So I would say that that's it. And as far as like mastery of it, I'm not a master of this at all. Okay. I talk to guys in the NFL all the time. But who will kind of tap me on the shore and be like, yeah, you're about 65 to 68% of the way there, but here's what you're missing, right? So I would say it's an, it's an unending journey, whether it's offense or defense, but position group, pick a scheme, watch the clinics, watch the teach tape, and that will kind of give you a picture for how everything works.

If you just punch in defensive coaching clinic into YouTube, the type of stuff that comes out, it's like Kirby Smart Install stuff, you know, just various types of, your college teams, especially college, I think is a little rarely more available. than stuff in the NFL just because college coaches are given more clinics. But this stuff is available. You know, I'm looking at it right now. Here's a two-hour clinic from Bill Callahan from the cool conference, like three years ago

that you can watch if you want to win a more offensive line film. It's one YouTube search. You can spend a lot of time on here. And I think YouTube is your best friend, I think, is exactly what I would tell people, just because if you want to spend some time and really dig into this stuff, there's tons of stuff available on here. The only reason why I know about the Shanahan office is from watching Alex Gibbs clinics. that's how I started.

I learned what I learned what the philosophy was behind it, what they did with their offensive line. And then I had, you know, you can look up some of these old playbooks and I was watching the film, back to the playbook. Okay, this makes sense. Okay, this makes sense. And then when you start watching it on Sundays on your TV, you're like, oh, there's 11 personnel with tight splits.

And I can see, you know, they run the tight end in motion. It runs this little counter motion. They're probably running outside zone to the tight end side. Oh, there you go. Or here comes a play action. Here comes this. Here comes that. It'll give you, it'll give you just reference.

points. That's how you really come to understand this stuff is to have a bunch of different reference points that you can borrow from. All right. Let's get to our next voicemail here, Kat. Hey guys, big fan of the show. First, want to say, Deonté, congrats on the full-time gig at the Athletic. Been enjoying your work thus far. excited that you guys are doing the mailbag today. Deontay, given your background on the defensive side of things, I wanted to ask you, coming into the draft, it seems like the top two linebackers. were Devin Lloyd and Nikobe Dean with Quay Walker not too far off.

Now, we know why Nacoble did fell, but I think the surprise of the night for me, looking at those linebackers, was that Quay Walker went ahead of Devin Lloyd. I think for most of the expert consensus opinion I saw, this seemed to be a remissal of what most people thought would happen with Devin Lloyd being the first linebacker off the board. So I'm curious what it is.

is about Quay Walker that you think made him the first linebacker off the board. Thanks so much, guys. All right. I know that you, we talked about this before the draft. You and I chatted about the linebackers and which types of guys might be in demand, all of that. How would you answer this question? I would say, on one end, the Quay Walker pick for the Packers is a very specific Packers thing

in terms of their interest in, like, body type and athletic pro. profile. Anybody who was interested in the Packers are just interested in this in general. I would recommend that you follow a good friend of mind, Justice Mosqueda, because I don't know of anybody who was as plugged in to understanding how the Packers think in the front office about draft prospects as he is. To the point where it's a pathology. Yes. It concerns me at times. But I think that in terms of body types, that's why they were really interested.

And then if you want to talk in skill sets, one of the reasons why I really like Quay Walker and why I understood him being the first linebacker taken off the board is because he takes that body type runs the way that he runs and he can actually go play in coverage. And I think that that's going to be something that we continue to see, I think be valued at the second level of a defense. And I think that he can cover in a way that Devin Lloyd can't, not to say that he'll never get there, but if we're talking about where we're walking in at on day one as a rookie, I think that Quay Walker, I would say that he and Chad Mooma were probably the two best coverage guys

in this draft class at the linebacker position. And I really wasn't all that shocked. And when you think about the Packers and already having Devondre Campbell, and this is something I've heard from other Packers guys, Joe Barry wants to find as many ways as possible to keep him in the box and not having to go split out and play over tight ends and, you know, have to deal with the spread stuff because that's just not what really plays, I think, to his specific skill set.

So that's kind of- In the slot than any linebacker in the NFL last season, Devonre Campbell, by necessity, I think. Exactly. And they played, they had a revolving door of second lineback, second inside linebackers all year long. So I think that this is to address that, allow Devondra Campbell to do what he does best, ask Quay Walker to go be the athlete in space or be the guy you can flex out. As far as Devin Lloyd, I just think that he was more of an acquired taste than, you know, I think the general media consensus had led people to believe. I don't think that everybody was as in love with him as we might have heard throughout the process.

obviously not running the greatest 40 in the world while it wasn't terrible did not help. And I think that he's just a little bit more raw than some of the other people that we saw are some of the other linebackers that we saw taken in the first two rounds, first three rounds of the draft. I'm really fascinated to see what Jacksonville actually has planned for him because they're kind of a glut of linebackers and I don't exactly know how that rotation is going to work out for him. It's funny that they picked Lloyd, who you didn't love and then Mooma, who's like, your dude.

Yep. It's interesting. How that ultimately shakes out is certainly worth watching, especially considering they paid a linebacker. I'd say, and then they paid a lewiken, like, you know, real linebacker money, like very serious. A concerning amount of money. I would assume, and this is based on nothing,

that Devin Lloyd will be on the Devin White early on plan, right? A lot of moving forward, not a lot of playing in space. Like, we're going to use you as a pressure guy. We're not going to make you, those gears aren't going to be turning a lot your first year in the league or so you're going to be playing forward pretty often if i had to make a guess because that's what my call well comes from and all that kind of stuff so all right let's get to our next one here chris romano says my question is for dante everyone asks you questions nobody wants to know what i think about anything and that's fine my question for dante is in regards to indy

obviously they've undergone a full overhaul in their defensive staff this offseason i was originally skeptical of the bradley hire perhaps uninspired is a better word but the more i hear the players and staff talk about playing a true attacking front in the solemn old. Nate Ollie was brought in for a reason. We'll talk about that a second. And acquiring a true man, corner, and Gilmore and a pure pass rusher in Gakway, the more optimistic I've become, this would be an aggressive unit built to pressure the hell out of quarterbacks.

Something Indy was miserable at last year under Fluse. Bradley has recently spoken about tailoring the deed to his players, but I was hoping to hear what you might expect from this defensive scheme to look like and its odds being a top five unit in the league. Well, if you're asking me what I expect is to look like, I expect to look like exactly what it's been since 2012 because he hasn't really budged a whole lot on that. What I do think is important, though, or an important way to kind of think about this, does come back to what Gus Bradley believes in up front, which is allowing his defensive

linemen to tear off up the field. If we want to talk about one thing that he absolutely does provide value on, that would be it. And using stunts and twists to attack offenses. It's not just to, you know, play, you know, those. too high, too deep, cover four, cover six shells, where you're just asking a defensive line to stunt and eat up gaps. So a guy like Darius Leonard can stay clean and kind of range over the top to match with

where the ball is going. But to really allow your edge rushers, you know, you think about Quitty Pay, who is as athletic as any edge rusher you'll get, you know, and somebody that I think has a decent ceiling, you know, being a pure pass rush type, I think. You can maybe tap into a little bit extra with him. You have DeForest Buckner as a three technique, or you can do a whole lot of. more with, I think, than just asking him to kind of eat up gaps on the interior. He did it.

I mean, he comes from a world where he's very comfortable doing that. The whole reason why he's being paid what he's paid now is because of what he was able to do, you know, at his last stop in San Francisco. And then you think about Yonnik and Gakwe, who was another guy who I think kind of fits in kind of ideally as a secondary rusher in this type of defense. That's what this is about. It's about, you know, kind of making a shift in emphasizing front to back in terms of your defensive structure.

That's what Gus Bradley has been, and that's exactly what I expect him to be going forward. Fun little piece of NFL genealogy here, right? So he mentioned Nate Ollie, who is the Colts first year defensive line coach. Okay, Nate Ollie was the Jets assistant defensive line coach last year. The two years before that, he was with the Eagles. Okay, if we're tracing this back, here, watch how this happens.

Okay, Jim Schwartz was the Titans defensive coordinator in the early 2000s. his defensive line coach in that stop was a guy named Jim Washburn, who helped popularize that attacking wide nine approach for defensive fronts. For two years in the early 2000s, the Titans had a backup defensive tackle named Chris Kasurik. When Jim Schwartz was eventually hired to be the head coach in Detroit, Chris Kasurik eventually became his defensive line coach. Jim Washburn was an assistant on those teams. Schwartz was the defensive coordinator in Philadelphia. when Nate Ali was an assistant there over the last in 19, 2019 and 2020.

Nate Ali then went to San Francisco where Chris Kusurik's protege is now the defensive line coach with the Jets because they play that same way. So that's, if you want to go from how that ultimately all ends up tying together, that's how it works. I love that shit. You can just kind of figure out like all the, all the connection points and everything else. So that type of approach is going. the way of the dinosaur a little bit.

There aren't that many teams that play like that. So it's become, you know, what would you say, four or five? Yeah, yeah, it's really just a one handful of guys left that really believe in doing things that way anymore. So one team that would have been in that mold, Chris Kiffin, who was on those Niners staffs, went to Cleveland with Joe Woods. He just moved on. They just hired a guy named Jordan Thomas to be their defensive line coach. She was at San Diego State for the last three years.

I know absolutely nothing about the way San Diego State. plays defensive football. You might as someone who lives in San Diego. Absolutely. I mean, it's a 3-3-5 defense where they play a lot of attacking, a lot of blitzing, a lot of stunning. So I think that that would kind of give you an idea of what Cleveland believes in or what they're reinforcing as a defensive line as well. Yeah, it's funny just to watch like the little pockets of philosophy and style in the NFL and how it kind of travels and what doesn't. And I think that specific style is definitely one that's pretty pretty interesting. Okay. Next one here. This question is so stupid, and I love it so much.

Austin Solano asks, I have literally the dumbest question ever, but it's something I've always thought about. Figure now is the right time to ask with defensive guru Deante Lee on the pod. Theoretically, an entire starting defense could wear numbers in the 90s and the 40s. The number fond of some teams make it difficult

to discern the difference between certain numbers in those ranges. Check out the Detroit Lions as an example. For example, Mike could wear 99, shout out Levon Kirkland, and my safeties could wear 44 and 49. have other linebackers with 94 and 98 and a defensive line of 41, 97, 47, throwing corners and slok eyes with 46 and 48, and you've got yourself an aesthetic-based defense strategy. Would there be an advantage to wearing uniform numbers in such a way that it could confuse the opposing team and especially the quarterback? This is wonderfully stupid, but I wanted to hear your answer because I've talked to some offensive coaches who do believe that it's kind of a pain in the ass with the way that the numbers have changed over the last couple of years.

But I'm curious what you think about this specific strategy. As somebody who lives in the coaching world, I can't tell you how happy it makes me when there are wide receivers of the same size and length that one wears white cleats and one wears black cleats. It's the best. Or any sort of any type of accessory. Yes. I was like, if I see the same wristbands like and both guys wearing long sleeves, I want to

pull my hair out. Like, please give me something, especially if they're like all single digit type of guys. Like it absolutely just drives me up a wall. And I think that you kind of made reference to this before we got on. the show. It is something that I think about too, which is Tom Brady's quote, where he talks about now that, you know, guys can wear whatever numbers. If a number 26 is the mic, then there's a guy and he standing next to somebody who's wearing 44, there is going to be a little bit of that kind of brain lock that you get as a pro quarterback having spent, you know, 15, 18, 20 years

in the league where every other time you've looked at it like, oh, this must be a dime package in 44. That's the mic. That's the way that I've always known it. Oh, wait a second. That's actually they're starting, you know, Sam linebacker, and he's here as the mic in the dime package. So I do think it can be a little bit silly. I would say if we had, at where I coach at, if we had numbers that looked the way that like the lions do or like maybe the buccaneers do, then you can kind of get into that aesthetics-based defense. I would 100% control the process.

It will probably make me the least popular coach on the staff for picking kids as numbers. But it would definitely make us, I think it will give us a little bit of an edge, I think. I would love to see something like that happen. That's Austin alluded to that. His question said, it'd be hard to convince players to pick certain numbers. A corner doesn't want to wear 40 something. Right. I promise you that's going to be a tough sell.

Aggressively unsexy. It's going to be a tough sell. Even Marlon Humphrey can't make 44 look good. I know he wears it because of his dad. It's a sweet story. And I appreciate that a lot. But even Marlon and Humphrey can't make 44 look good. That's just not going to go well for anybody.

I will tell you the most heartbreaking tale of my football career was my redshirt year at Sack State. and they gave me this slip where I get to put it in the size of my cleats, my gloves, and I get to talk about what number I want. And they give you three options. You know, and I'm like, oh, man, nobody's wearing number five here. That's what I wore in high school. I'm going to put that down.

If I don't get that, 33. Like, it's not the coolest number in the world, but my dad wore it, and I can make it work. And then my last one was 17 because I thought that it'll look cool in our uniforms. And you want to know when I came to my locker the next day of the number I had, 46. Oh, no. It's the worst number. 46 is the worst one. I felt like, I felt like they were trying to tell me how,

they felt about me when they gave me 46. My high school, I wore 53 in high school. And all you need to know about my personality is expressed by this story. Okay. My sophomore year, we had this incredible offensive line. I've talked about a little bit before. Four guys go D1. They were just average 65 280, just like a fistful of monsters.

It's unbelievable. So the center on that team was a senior. He wore 53. His name was Jason Sessney. He was a Pipple. He was so good. my size, just like, just real, real asshole in a good way. So he graduated, and I was a junior, and the only starting spot available was the center

spot on that offensive line. I wanted it more than anything else in the world was to be the starting center on that offensive line with all those dudes. I won the job, and when they asked me what number I wanted, I picked 53 because that was his number because I didn't want anyone to know that anything had changed. I wanted to be completely invisible, and I wanted to be, you know what, Sesame more 53, So I'll do the same thing just so I don't stand out. There you go.

I've described myself many times as a walking apology. Like that's exactly, that is an example of everything you need to know about me as a person. I just didn't want anyone to know that it was me and that they just thought it was him. So I picked the same number. Absolutely. And now it's like, I love it. It's like, you know, it's a part of me now. You know, it's like I use it in a lot of different ways and whatever.

But in the moment, I came about it in a very accidental fashion. All right. Let's get to our last voicemail here, Kat. Hi, guys. This is Reagan. From the fan of the pod, really wanted to take advantage of Deonté's experience as a defensive coordinator with my question, which is to say, Deonti, if you were asked to be the Patriots offensive coordinator, much in the same way a defensive coordinator was, do you think you could do it? Do you think any defensive coordinator could just go ahead and be an offensive coordinator? All right, that's all I got.

I love the tone in his voice so much because it's bewilderment, concern, but also curiosity. The combination of everything happening in that question, Reagan, I could feel it. I could feel it deep in my bones. So thank you very much for making the call. Oh, man, could I do my, I mean, the honest answer is no. The arrogance in me would like to say yes, but the honesty in me will not allow me to step out and say that I could do that job. What is the biggest barrier? What is the hardest part if you were.

ask to make that transition on short notice. To me, it's all like it's language, right? Like how you speak about that side of the ball is just different. The approach is just different. And I think that that kind of speaks to why I think people can kind of look at that situation and maybe recognize that it looks a little absurd, right? Like I don't even know how I would go about trying to articulate a point to a quarterback because I don't think I could speak to him the same way.

I would speak to a safety, even though they both have the same amount of vision. of the field, right? I just don't think that you could speak in those same kinds of ways. When you talk about tendencies on, you know, the defensive end, I'm talking about guys like stances and their splits. I can get down to, you know, something as menial as, hey, if his toes pointed this way, then they're probably running outside zone. And that's all well and good.

And there is a piece of that to an offense, but I don't, I wouldn't know how to go about articulating that or looking for those types of things. It all just comes down to like language barrier. That is a whole other world over there. And there's a reason why for me as a coach, I don't even look in that direction. When we're doing individuals and installs, the offense is non-existent. I don't even ask. And I'm glad that my head coach doesn't ask me because we definitely do not speak the same

kind of English on the football field. We were talking about Mack Jones. I don't even know what day it was. It's hard to figure it out anymore. Last week, we were talking about the quarterbacks. And I didn't even mention the fact that we don't know who's going to call plays for the Patriots, just because I forget, it's so easy to just think, Oh, Josh McDaniels is there.

Their offense will be the same. It'll be really good. They'll do a good job. And you forget, not only is Josh McDaniels not there. They don't have anybody that's a ready-made replacement for him. So I am a little bit more concerned about this step we were talking about the Patriots offense potentially taking with Tyquan Thornton and some of the other, you know, go get Devante Parker and all right, the personnel is a little bit better.

Could they take a step forward? This is beyond Joe Judge potentially calling offensive plays for them. It could work, but I am not. as confident as I might be if Josh McDaniels was still there. I would like to not have to say it could work when we're talking about developing a quarterback in his second year and trying something. That's even it's capped out. You've spent all these resources.

You know, I will say if Bill is able to make this work, I literally will not hear a single negative word about this guy as a coach for as long as I live. I have no idea how this works. And I think I heard like some rationalization from like Patriots guys about how, oh, this is just about not naming anybody to a high level position. so that way they can continue to get their buyout money.

I'm like, okay, even if I grant you that, somebody still has to call the offensive plays that, I don't care who's titled what. Somebody's got to hold, somebody's got to hold the play sheet. Somebody's going to have that laminated sheet in their hands, and I don't know who it's going to be, and I don't know if I like any of the potential answers that are available right now.

I hope Belcher just does it. Oh, yeah, I would love that. I hope he just does it. It would just be amazing. I wouldn't put it past them either. All right, last one here from D.E. Dean Crystal, okay, says Aaron Glein has talked about the defensive front changing from more read base to more attack this season. He mentioned they'll be attacking the back foot of the

offensive lineman instead of the front foot. Could you explain to me an idiot what this means and how this could affect linebacker and even secondary play? Aaron Gleyn is the defensive coordinator for the Lions for people who would do not know. So this would be specific to Detroit. I could not explain this. So I was wondering if you could because it's a very specific question. I love that he use that phrasing, Aaron Glenn and Dean in the question, because that is just such like a coach brain thing to say. It is so small, but it says so much in saying nothing. And basically what it is, it's a transition to playing through the shoulder and offensive linemen to the idea of stopping the run on the way to the quarterback. I'm sure that almost everybody's heard that, right, when you talk

about edge rusher play or, you know, three technique play. So if you're talking about attacking the front foot, that's what you would say, you know, the terminology. and coaching is React attack. You might hear that from like a Brandon Staley, and that kind of ties into that gap and a half, where I want to strike a guy, you know, I want to stalemate him, peek over, which way is the ball going, then I'll go make my move. You know, I might be a little bit later to my pass rush in that context, unless we're talking about some kind of obvious passing situation.

Where if we're talking about attacking the back foot, I'm really getting to my sprinter stance and trying to tear off up the field, and I'm going to see what the flow of the play is as I get into the backfield. And I think that that kind of ties into what I think they're trying to do, which is getting to that Dennis Allen-esque, you know, four, four down, but playing quarters coverage. Sounds like the saints. Yes. Like, and I think that, you know, obviously it's instructive knowing Aaron Glenn's history and some of the guys who are on that defensive staff, that's exactly what it is, is you still want, I think they're, you're trying to find that perfect midpoint between allowing your edge rushers to really go get after the quarterback while also

playing light in the box. And I think that that also perfectly kind of ties into what we were talking about earlier with the question about the New Zealand international cricket team, which is, you know, it's about high effort, high energy. That's what's stopping to run under that kind of defensive structure is all about. And I kind of like the fact that they're going to give it a try because the degree of difficulty on that is pretty high. It's not an easy thing to accomplish. So I'm fascinated to see whether or not they can make that work. But that would be the difference. It's like React Attack to Attack React, basically in coaching parlance. So bring it all the way back around.

The Detroit Lions defensive line coach is Todd Wash, who was the defensive line coach for Gus Bradley in Jacksonville. And was defensive coordinator in Seattle, I think, for a year or two as well. Yep. He was the defensive line coach in Seattle. Yep. And so it all comes back. It all comes back. It's all connected in some way, shape, or form.

We have like 10 questions we didn't get to, but we've already been doing this for an hour and 10 minutes. we are going to put a pin in this for now. We will come back to more defensive questions with Deante on the mailbag at some point in June or July. We got several of these to fill. Thank you very much, my friend. I learned a lot. I hope everyone else learned a lot. That was fun as hell.

Thank you, man. Thank you for having me. We will definitely talk soon. All right. That's all we got for today. As a reminder, I am currently on vacation, but that does not mean you will not be getting more podcasts this week. Thursday. Non-quarterback draft with me and Nate and Lindsay.

It was very, very fun. I hope you guys enjoy that. So please come back in and check that out. If you are screeding things at me about how terrible my picks were, I will be eating a taco somewhere and will not see it. So just so you guys know right now. As long as Aaron Donald goes first, I'm happy. If he doesn't, you guys will all be getting very long slack messages from me.

I'm not going to give it away. I am not going to give it away. All right. For now, please rate and review the podcast on your podcast platform of choice. I very much appreciate that. please subscribe to the athletic. What are you working on? You're right in this week?

So I put something up basically kind of playing off of what Nate, Nate Tice was working on in terms of asking a question of all the new defensive play callers. So that's up. If you guys missed one of the conversations I was having about Pete Carroll, you know, making that move from single high to a two deep world and four three defense to three four defense. I kind of talked about the trends of the league through that lens, which I found to be really interesting.

And I got some good feedback on. And then the next couple of weeks, I'll be a little bit more college-centric. talking about the next the next crop of guys coming into the draft. So that'll be something to look out for over the next 14 or so days as well. Please, please, please. If you guys did not have a subscription to The Athletic, go get one. Deante's piece about the Seahawks again.

We're going to dig into various bits of that conversation a lot here over the course of this summer. It's a great primer. Just the general flow of defensive ideas in the NFL right now. So highly encourage you guys to go take a look at that. If you have not, Theathletic.com slash football show is where you do. that we'll be back on Thursday until then appreciate you guys listen talk to you soon