The Ringer NFL Show - Why the Belichick Coaching Tree Keeps Failing

Episode Date: June 30, 2023

Ben and Steven continue their offseason deep dive into some of the biggest questions around the league. This week, they look into Bill Belichick’s coaching tree and try to figure out why defensive coaches have a harder time breaking through to head coaching ranks. They start off by distinguishing why Belichick’s coaching style is hard to replicate elsewhere (01:48) before looking into the rest of the defensive coaching trees in the league (19:53), then discuss why offensive coaching trees seem to fare better (48:48). Hosts: Ben Solak and Steven Ruiz Producer: Eduardo Ocampo Additional Production Supervision: Arjuna Ramgopal and Conor Nevins Musical Elements: Devon Renaldo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, friends, and welcome to a golf podcast unlike any other. This is Fairway Rowland on the Ringer podcast network. I am your starter. Joe House every week on Fairway Rowland. It is myself and our PGA tour correspondent on the ground, Nathan Hubbard, talking all things professional golf, amateur golf, amateur betting, professional betting, amateur drinking, professional drinking, my birdie buddies. If you want to hit them straight out there,

please check out Fairway Rowland every week. Available on Spotify. I'm Ben Solac, and this is The Ringer NFL show. I'm joined today by the magnificent Stephen Ruiz. Stephen say hi to the people. Hi, people. And today we are talking about the 2005 Cleveland Browns, baby. A little Derek Anderson.

Trent Dilfer, actually. It was Dilfer in 2005. and then into the Charlie Frye era and then Derek Anderson after that. More importantly, for our purposes here, we're talking about Romeo Cronnell, who is the head coach of that team and one of the first Bill Belichick assistants to be hired to be a head coach in the NFL. Now, it's no secret that Belichick's assistants tend to struggle outside of Foxborough, but why? Is it something to do with Belichick or is there something else at play?

Is there a reason why so many of the NFL's head coaching trees are on the offensive side of the ball, while defensive trees rarely break the coordinator ranks. Today on the ringer NFL show, why the Bill Belichick coaching tree sucks. Steven? Do we have to start? I think we might have to start with a little like, Bill Belichick's still a good coach,

even though he hasn't won anything with Tom Brady. He's only won things with Tom Brady, and now Tom Brady's gone and maybe they're not as good before, but we still establish the Belichick's the goat, right? Yeah, yeah, for sure. Okay, they made the playoffs with Mack Jones two years ago. That's an accomplishment that goes on his resume. What will be more impressive to you

at the end of the Belichick era whenever it comes? Two decades of dominance with Tom Brady or like four years of propping up Mac Jones. That ain't like the Mac Jones thing combined with winning 11 games with Matt Castle. Another legendary stroke, yes. And so Belichick, I think like, it feels like a weird time to talk about Belichick assistance

because we're past like the Joe Judge Brian Flores era of a couple years ago. Now we have like, you know, Josh McDaniels and Brian Dable, if you want to put him in there, and some of these offensive coaches who have been under Belichick before, and even some guys who have had some success, like you look at Dable, you look at what Bill O'Brien did with the Texans, now back with the Patriots.

But talking about the Bill Belichick tree, I think it's the most helpful tree for us to understand how coaching trees generally work in the NFL. So we'll start with that Belichick tree. For those of you who aren't as sickos following Bill Belichick's coaching lineage and don't remember, we're talking about the 10 and 23 Joe Judge New York Giants. I'm talking about the 13 and 29 Matt Patricia Detroit Lions. Romeo Cronnell of before mentioned jokes, who 15 of his 32 head coaching games for an interim capacity,

elite stat for Romeo, just the God assistant head coach. Overall, as a head coach was 32 and 63. Eric Mangini with the rounds 33 and 47. You have Josh McDaniels, who was 11 and 17 with the Broncos, and then what was he with the Raiders? Eight and nine, Raiders were, seven and ten? Yeah, yeah. Brian Flores almost broke 500 with the Dolphins,

24 and 25, so close, you know, was probably going to beat it if the Dolphins just let him stay employed, but no. And then Bill O'Brien, the only Belichick assistant to have a positive winning record's head coach, 52 and 48 in his time with the Texans, at which point he flew a little too close to the sun, tried to do the GM thing, and summarily imploded. However, as we like to remind you on this podcast,

vindicated by the D'Andre Hopkins, Arizona Cardinals era, the most jokey take that I will still live and die on. I said Bill O'Brien was right. Regardless, when you look at those Belichick assistant, Stephen, I think that there's two ways to talk about how those guys failed when they left Bill Belichick's umbrella. One is the framework of offense versus defense, right? Because a lot of the defensive assistants really struggled.

That's your Cronnells, that's your Manginis, that's your Matt Patricia's. Well, the offensive coaches actually have a little bit more mixed success, right? Bill O'Brien kind of being the clarion voice there. But the other issue is one of culture, right? And I think that so much of Bill Belchick's success with the Patriots has been attributed to the Patriot way. And when you look at some of the culture issues in New York with Joe Judge, in Detroit

with Bill O'Brien, even with Bill O'Brien in Houston, I think there's some good evidence for the fact that you can't really take the page. Patriot Way out of New England. And so what do you, on those two reasons, what to you is more compelling as like, this is the issue. This is the real reason why the Belichick assistants tend to struggle. I think it's the, I would say the fact that the Patriot Way, to me at least, is just nonsense. And I think if you ask Bill Belichick, like, that's not a phrase they use. I don't think it's a concept he like leans on.

Like he's not printing out T-shirts that say the Patriot Way during mini camps and training camps. So I would say it's that. And I think you look at that list of failed coaches. And I feel like, and maybe he doesn't belong in this list, but I feel like you left out a very key name when you went down that list. And that's one Nicholas Sabin. Okay.

Well, because Sabin's not a good indicator of how a coaching tree works. Because, like, there are other guys who went to college ranks. Like, there was like Charlie Weiss and Algrove and, like, these guys. Because that was, like, a different time. Like, Sabin's career is, how much credit are we given? Bill Belichick for creating Nick Saban. No, no, but the point I'm making is Nick Saban, who has been

the best college football coach ever maybe, failed as an NFL head coach, if you want to call it that. He did leave Miami, kind of on his own terms, but he failed in part because he was a bit of an asshole. And now you look at the common thread in why all these guys

failed. Matt Patricia, Josh McDaniels, even Brian Flores had a lot of like, that was the report after he was fired was that he was hard to get along with. And like there was disagreements with guys like Kenny Stills, I think had a big disagreement with them about like music they were playing at practice and all that. And I think it's like I'm sure when they're in the building in New England, they're watching Bill Belichick. And he's like famously a cramudgeon. They're like, oh, like that's the secret sauce or that's part of it.

And I think that's the mistake they're making. I don't know if that's the mistake that teams that are hiring them are making. I think they are, they think they're hiring the Patriot program, like the Patriot way of building a team. But I don't think that's actually a thing. And I think that's the mistake. So I think it falls on not only the fact that that Patriots, coaches. I mean, I think it's that like Bill Belichick has such a mind that you're never going to be able to replicate that elsewhere. Like I remember there being a big deal about when the Colts were trying to hire Josh McDaniels. And one of the ways that Belichick had kind of convinced him to stay was like, hey, I'm going to open up like my book to you. I'm going to show you everything that I think about head coaching and what it means. And it was kind of odd that he said that because this had been like a decade into them working together.

And you would think that just kind of naturally happens. So it almost sounds like Belichick has like knows or has this like book on how to be a head coach and he only kind of exposes it to these guys if he really needs to. I don't know. That was a weird report that came out after McDaniels went to, went back to New England after the Indianapolis thing. But I think it matters. And I think it's really compelling. I wish it was like a thread that the reporters that were putting that out there like pulled on and like kind of examined, but we really never got anything on it. And I'm sure that you try to, but that's a really hard thing to suss out, right? Like when you go and you try to read on the Patriot Way, it's always like the thing about the Patriot way is that

it's all about being unselfish. And it's like, okay, are other coaches in other systems just walking on day one and being like self-oriented football? We're going to go for your stats. Look for your opportunity. Like, no, like everybody preaches unsalvish football.

But here's the thing. Here's the thing. I feel like Belichick has gotten this genius reputation just by doing things that are like almost common sense. It's like, you know what Belichick does so well? He takes away the thing you do best. And it's like, dude, None of the other coaches think about that.

And then it's like, oh, we're going to double a guy on third down, their top receiver. And everyone's like, whoa, go to check, crack the code. It's kind of like all things in life where, like, you know, I'm trying to think of like good examples. Like, I always think like, you know, like a college kid would be like, how do you get into this field? And it's kind of like, okay, well, it's not really like the secrets of like how you get into this field. It's more just like, are you going to like do a lot of work a lot of the time with a lot of effort? Like, it'd be nice if knowing the what to do was 90% of the battle and knowing how to do it and then having like the wherewithal to do it is the final 10% but it's really flipped, right? Like all coaches preach, let's take away what they do well.

All coaches preach being unselfish. That, if that was it, a lot of coaches would be good. I think a lot of coaches are not good. I think there's probably less than 32 good head coaches in the NFL. And it's because knowing what way to shoot, knowing which way to point is that. not the biggest part of the battle. It's like the wherewithal and the how and that's where I think things get really convoluted. But I agree with you that if there's like a one liner for Belichick in the framework of the Patriot way, it's that he has whatever it is. Like I don't

think there's there's an easy word for it. But he has been able to get the plane off the ground of like, yeah, I'm an a hole and I do things that are annoying, but this will work and will be championship team. And like I say get the plane off the ground there because at this point, and easily for the last decade or so, it's been reputation and the proof of the pudding is in the eating, right? Like anybody who goes to New England is like, well, Belcher's like a championship coach. I'm going to do what he tells me to do. But initially you have to get that plane off the ground. You have to have whatever, you know, charisma it is, whatever connection skills, whatever luck, whatever, you know, talent in other areas, whatever combination of traits to be like,

listen, I'm going to make rookies wear number 50, even when they play wide receiver, and, like, you know, I'm going to make them, like, do 100 pushups and jog a lot every time they fumble it, right? The Joe Judge stuff tried to do when he used the Giants, but this is going to work. Like, a lot of guys, I think, can bring that, whether Belichick castoffs or otherwise, they'll bring that sort of a culture, that's sort of a toughness, right? That's sort of like, these are the standards. This is my aggressiveness.

Like, I'm going to be barking. I'm going to be frustrated. I'm going to be in your face. I'm going to be high standards. Many less guys. far fewer guys are able to convince players that that works for long enough to show them that it works, gets some proof of the pudding. And then after that, it's kind of like a self-sustaining ecosystem. We're like, all right, we won. And so this clearly works. There's a, there's a great

book about Bill Belichick by David Halberstam. It's called The Education of a Coach. And it kind of like follows him throughout his like coaching journey from being like a kid that just loved football because his dad, Steve Belichick was a scout and a career coach. And, He, when he broke into the NFL, he was like a 20-something-year-old lackey who was, like, working on special teams. And it talked about, like, how he kind of worked against that. Because when you see that, when you're an NFL player, like a 30-year-old NFL player and you see this, like, small kid you've never heard of trying to teach you about ball. You're probably like, what does this guy know? He's younger than me.

But that's how I feel whenever I ask NFL players anything in the media. I'm always like, hey, I'm sorry I'm small and tiny. It looks like a child. I don't feel great about this either. But here's my question. Yeah, they see you and they're expecting one of those softball questions when like the kid reporting gets a chance to ask a question. Yeah, I think I'm going to get like a TikTok question, which can be like, if you had five, you know, desert island items. Yeah, exactly. It's just not, it's not great.

But Belichick, how he kind of gained that respect was just like giving them little details and like on how to be better, like how to be a better player. And then it would work on the field and then that's how you get the respect. And when you hear other players talk about like other coaches even beyond Belichick, that's the common thread. and that's how you gain that respect. It's not going to be something you can force just by yelling at a guy. And I think that's part of the problem. And we're going to get into this later, but it's so hard just to figure out who's going to be a head coach without having seen them do it before.

And here's a great example of that. I wrote an article after the lines sign Matt Patricia saying in the headline. Here's the headline. You hire coaches. You don't sign them. Yeah, sorry about it. Why Matt Patricia? won't fail in the same way Bill Belichick's former assistants have.

Great take, Stephen. You really nailed that one. A little SEO. But part of my reasoning when I wrote about it was that Patricia was like built as this guy who was kind of like fun loving. Like he was a guy that you can get along with. There was a quote from Brandon Spice in that in that story. And maybe it's Brandon Spice went on to be a coach. So maybe he was like he liked what Patricia was selling. But this is what he said about Patricia. He said, I would go to a dark place and he talked to me. had all this other stuff going on, he would still find the time. I don't know how he did it. I could talk to him about anything. I mean anything. It didn't matter what time it was. I know I can call him

even at night and he's going to pick up the phone. If I read that quote about a coach, like Matt Patricia would be the last person you guessed that coach that that quote is about. So I think that they get into, like they get into the role that they've seen Belichick get into and then they try to mimic him. And I think that's where you have the issues. Yeah. And there's probably a necessary caveat here of like not all NFL players are coded the exact same way and there's there are going to be some guys who respond really well to a Matt Patricia and then some guys who don't and probably your job as an owner is to find a guy to whom the majority of dudes will connect right to whom the majority of guys will respond or at the very least a guy a guy who

for the players to whom he connects he connects with them so well that it's really going to elevate the team and so like that's that's why we say right like Matt Patricia doesn't have like necessarily the people skills to get this thing off the ground it's like that's kind of that's a generalization. That always makes it tough. Patricia is such an interesting guy to me because like I always think about Patricia and Brian Flores in the context of Darius

Sleigh and Mika Fitzpatrick. We're like, Brian Flores got the Miami job and we were all like, holy smokes. What is this guy going to do with Minka? Like Minka is like a perfect Patriots defensive back. He can play safety as well as he can play corner, he can play outside, he can play inside. He's a save in DB, right? So is your saving

Billichick connection. Like this is perfect. And then with Patricia, when Patricia took over for the lions, it was okay, well, Darius Slay is one of the best man cover corners in the league. Matt Patricia's going to play only man coverage. And that's exactly what he did is just play man coverage, just, you know, Patriot stuff, play some man, get some double teams, get some cones. Like, we're just going to line up and play man. This is going to be perfect. And then both of those guys immediately pissed off the dudes who should have been perfect for their defenses. It wasn't like, like, they pissed off an different star who didn't no longer,

who no longer fit in the team and had a reduced role or something like that. It was, they, they upset the guys who should have been easiest to make happy from a football perspective. Like it should have been, turn to Darius slang, go like, you're going to do exactly what you want to do extremely well.

And then turn to, turn to my, Mick up and Spatchewski and go, we're going to line you up in a variety of ways and have success with you. Now, obviously for Minka, Minka was like, I want to be an outside corner, let me be an outside corner.

And Flores was kind of like, no, you're going to play the slot for us. And then Mika left to Pittsburgh. and then became a free safety and it's now the best free safety in the league like that whole situation. Now Brian Flores is on that staff and he's not on that staff

and that was a whole whatever. And now Matt Petersia's back with Darius Lay on the Eagle staff and it's kind of like, okay, do we make way too much out of these frustrations, way too much out of these like interpersonal conflicts? But that's where like I look at those moments and I go like, this just doesn't happen in New England.

Like New England gets like a star, a near star, a very good player, like somewhere in that first few tiers of guys. And there is never an issue with onboarding. that dude. He always gets the role that he expects and succeeds in that role. Like, like, they have their free agent misses, but it's often because they try to get like a B tier guy or a C tier guy and like step them up. When they got like a star player, like that dude always works the way you expect them to in New England. They don't, that Belichick doesn't have

those problems. Yeah. And I think part of that is just he's doing the onboarding for the players. Whereas when Matt Patricia, for instance, got to Detroit, Darius Lay had already been there. So it's kind of like, I think it's like almost a chicken or the egg situation. And I think a bigger part of it is, and like you said, the free agency, some of their bigger moves haven't worked out. But like when they, they're very good at drafting and developing players. I know sometimes they over draft guys and they don't work out. Who is that safety from like Stanford a couple years ago? I don't even remember.

But everyone was like, don't draft him in the second round. And then Patriots did it and he was very slow and he didn't work out. So I think that's part of it too. I think Belichick has this established program. They have this reputation. So, like, you kind of know what you're getting into when you're joining the Patriots, whether you're a rookie or a veteran-free agent. Jordan Richards.

Jordan Richards. That's who it was from 2015. And we're no longer in the era where that was, like, a few years ago. I was, like, a decade ago. Oh, my burden doesn't. I can't. I can't side. Yeah.

But, yeah, I think that's part of it. I just think, like, him having that established culture, like, even if the Patriot Way isn't a thing that he kind of leans on, it is a thing that we all know. Like, everyone knows about the Patriot way. And when you're getting drafted and you hear that you were drafted by the Patriots, I think you just go in with the assumption that this is, it's going to be this way. And when you hear, like, players talk about Bill Belichick, they're like, oh, yeah, I was like scared shitless to play for him.

I thought he was going to be this, like, big asshole. And then you get there and they're like, it wasn't really like that. He's actually kind of funny. Like, he's cool. Like, Randy Moss got along with him, like, famous. Right. Randy loved him. And Randy Moss couldn't get along with anybody before then.

So I think it's so funny that Bill Belichick gets like the players that he loves the most are like the players that are just like off the field problems. Like Lawrence Taylor. Everyone talks about how Belichick like won't stand for off the field shenanigans. Lawrence Taylor was his favorite player ever. And Lawrence, look, just go to Lawrence Taylor's Wikipedia page. I don't want to rehash it. So yeah, I think that Belichick, I think understanding what Belichick is as a coach and what he does, strong way he does a well. is challenging.

And I think that the Patriot Way is often like a red herring for that. It's a misnomer. I think that it's one of the easiest things to identify and be like, that's a zippy saying, that's like a culture thing. Like, that's a fun thing to talk about.

But I think I want to spend the rest of the pod talking about a different framework for understanding why Belichick is so good, why his assistants aren't great and what that means for the league. But first, advertisements. Okay, so let's step away from New England for a second

and just look at the league writ large. I just want to talk NFL coaches. Right now, there are 32 NFL head coaches. Surprise, there's 13 defensive coaching backgrounds among those head coaches. So 13 of the 32 have a background in coaching the defensive side of the ball. There's only 18 guys with an offensive background because John Harbaugh, the special team's goat, all right? The God, he like coached defensive backs like a year, but doesn't count. It's sitting there in the middle, just being the 32nd guy, just the third party representation for our head coaches.

But generally it's like 13 to 18, fairly even split, leans a little bit to the opposite. offensive side of the ball, which makes sense and that's intuitive. Most recent hires have been on the offensive side of the ball. But when you look at those 18 offensive coaches, it's actually really easy to put them into buckets, to put them into what we typically call coaching trees, right? The most obvious is the Andy Reid tree. Andy's obviously still coach and still doing the thing.

Doug Peterson went and began the Eagles coach and now is the Jaguars coach. Peterson had Frank Reich, who went and became the Colts coach and is now the Panthers coach. Frank Reich produced Nick Siriani, who is now the Eagles coach. And Nick Seriani produced Shane Steichen, who is now the Colts coach. The other tree is the kind of Shanahan slash McVeigh tree. And again, I'm staying in offensive coaches for right now. You see Mike McDaniel come straight off of Shanahan. You see Zach Taylor, Matt LaFleur, and Kevin O'Connell come right off of Sean McVeigh.

Those two trees are 11 of the 18 offensive coaches in the league right now. And a lot of the remaining guys are like old heads, right? Mike McCarthy, Sean Payton. There are also defensive branches to these trees that I think will acknowledge you have Ron Rivera and from him, John McDermott coming off the Andy Reed tree. They both spent time with him in Philadelphia. And then Chanahan has Robert Sala and D'Amico Ryan's. Sean McVeigh also has Brandon Staley.

But that's like one, maybe two offshoots from each one of those main guys. And that, we kind of see that on defensive coaches throughout the league. There's like maybe one branch, like maybe one to two connections, and that's really it. Largely the defensive coaches are siloed, right? Mike Tomlin's been a head coach since 2007. He's a defensive background. He doesn't have a tree to speak of. There's no head coach in the league right now who came from Mike Tomlin.

Pete Carroll has some guys who stepped out of his shadow and tried to become head coaches, Gus Bradley and Dan Quinn. These guys are no longer head coaches, right? You can argue Robert Sala, even then like Saul was kind of like an assistant. He was like two levels down. Dennis Allen, Todd Bowles, they are in their second stretch of being head coaches, despite the fact that neither one has successfully turned any defensive assistants into successful head coaches, right?

Like, we kind of live in a world where like the offensive coaching world is very connected and the defensive coaching world is very siloed. And so I don't necessarily think of Rivera and McNermott as shoots off the Andy Reed tree because they don't, it depends on how you think about it. But they don't like run the same system. They don't run what like Andy runs in terms of schematic, which we'll talk about. Shanahan is like a little bit different because Shanahan is a legend in terms of like blending the offensive and defensive side of the ball and making his coaches look both sides of the ways, but whatever. Is it fair, Stephen, to say that for head coaches, there's offensive trees, but really there are no, like, in the modern NFL and in recent

history, there's really no examples of like super successful defensive coaching trees at the head coach position. Yeah, I think the closest thing to it is the Fangio tree, which hasn't been successful at all. Like, even his defensive coordinators haven't been good away from him. And like the most successful defensive tree, like I think in history is like the Monte Kiffin tree because you get Pete Carroll and Tony Dungy. But Monique Giffin wasn't even an NFL head coach. That's a great point. That's a great point

because, like, Jim, I wouldn't even put Sean McDermott and Ron Rivera, and I think you can even throw John Harbaugh into that under the Andy Reachery. I'd put those two, the two defensive guys under Jim Johnson, who just happened to be Andy Reed's defensive coordinator. But there was no, like, there were, like,

McDermott and Rivera went on to get their head coaching jobs. it's not like they installed a Andy Reid offense. Right. And like when you've been a coach for almost three decades, as Andy has, you're just going to run into good coaches. Like you're just going to eventually employ good ones at some point, right? Like we're not putting spags in the Andy Reed.

In the Andy tree. Exactly. That was like the exact point I was about to bring up. And like the Monti Kiffin, again being a good example of like Monty just coached for forever. Like when you talk about the Pete Carroll defensive coaching tree, you're talking about like Seattle cover three guys. Monique was a cover two coach. Like just because Pete,

coached under Monty and then later had defensive assistant that became head coaches. There's not nearly as much of a connection. It's much harder to see the branch grow. Then in like an offensive system, we're like, all right, let's turn on some Andy Reed 2007 Eagles and then turn on some 22 Doug Peterson Jaguars and go, oh, those are the

same concepts 15 years later, which is like a little bit more window dressing. It's so much easier to see the branches. The connections are so much more clear. Yeah, but I think there is something to it where defensive coaches. I just don't think it's possible to have a tree just because the nature of defense and how the sport works where defense, and you said this when we were planning the show, like defense is reactionary. It's like passive. Like it's happening to you. Like the offense is bringing

the game to you. And I think it's hard to replicate that elsewhere just because the answer is going to, for like a defensive coordinator, the answers, the schematic answers and what they're calling is going to be based on what they're seeing from the opponent. So it's not like something you could just bring over to another team and we're going to play this style of football. Now, I'm, I'm kind of generalizing it and you can kind of play like a style of football, but it's not like a Shanahan thing where you see a Shanahan assistant go somewhere. You're going to be like, well, at least a couple years ago, it's like, oh, they're going to run wide zone. They're going to run play action. It's going to be the Shanahan offense. That doesn't really happen with defensive coordinators. Like even

Staley has deviated from the Fangio stuff since like over the last year. It would like the first year was definitely Fangio stuff. But I think last year and with the charges it started to deviate. And then you think about like Staley's own upbringing as a coach. And he was only with Fangio for a couple of years. So I, I just think that that's part of it. I don't think defensive coaches look at it as like this. I don't know.

I don't want to say fraternity. I don't even think they look at it as like coaching trees. I think they kind of look at it as being siloed more than the offensive guys. Yeah. Well, I think I think if we inherently, if we start from a place where offense is able to dictate more than defense, if we start at a place where defense is more reactive than offense, like is that an acceptable framework for NFL football? I think yes.

I think people would largely say yes. Then it is intuitive that it is easier to pass on a system along office. Offensive lines and it is along defensive lines. Like, that just makes sense, right? I play a lot of chess, right? When you're white and you move first, you can play openings where the first six moves or the first six moves and it pretty much doesn't matter what black does, right? You play the London, I mean, it's D4 and you're going.

Like, it's just, this is the system. You can just play it this way. It is much more challenging to do that when you're in a reactive position. You have to respond, right? Like, when I play tic-tac-toe and I'm going first, I'm placing in the center. I play Tick-Dact, I'm going second, I'm waiting to see what the first guy does. And then you kind of go from there, right? So it systems, frameworks for executing football that are holistic, and I don't want to say

unchanging, because unchanging a little bit too strong, but are at least analogous, are very clearly related. Those move along offensive lines. And accordingly, I think that it's definitely easier to see offensive coaching trees. It might not be the case that, there are more or that they actually exist better than defense coach reason. We're going to try to figure that out over the next 30 minutes. But it's definitely easier to see them. I would ask this. Like, Staley under Fangio, he's there with him in Chicago, right?

He gets hired by McVeigh to coach the Rams defense in 2020, 2021, a couple years ago. 2020. Yeah. And a huge part of that hiring is because Fangio stopped McVeigh's offense. Fangio was a really tough coach for McVeigh to deal with. And then McVey met Staley and was like, oh, this guy's a young Wiz kid. Like, I really like what I got from him. Let's bring him in.

So Staley runs the stuff. He runs some really cool defense. He gets hired by the Chargers right away. Now he's with the Chargers and he very clearly runs Fangeo-inspired stuff, but he also runs stuff that's different. So that's his story. Mike McDaniel is with Kyle Shanahan for forever. He's with him for five, six years.

He's his running game coordinator. He gets the head coaching job in Miami. And much like Brandon Staley, like young Wiz kid, got some new ideas, got some aggressive ideas. McDaniel absolutely unequivocally, to me, ran an offense that was more different than the Shanahan 49ers offense than I expected at Miami. And his offense was sick. It was awesome.

It was great. But it definitely was more distinct from Shanahan's San Francisco stuff, right? There was more gun. There was more RPO. There was more three-step drop. There was more pole. There was more downfield passing, right? Like, there was a lot, like, there were different items than you would expect to see from a Shanahan

offense. how can we figure out which ones are more different? You know what I'm saying? Like how do we figure out what divergence is and isn't acceptable? Or not like acceptable, but just like noticeable, notable, important when we talk about these schematic lineages.

Like Robert Sala kind of runs the Seattle cover three stuff, but not really, right? Like I'm trying to think of another example. Kevin O'Connell with the Vikings. He runs the RAM stuff, but he runs the Stafford Ram stuff a lot more than he runs like the golf ram stuff.

Like, are we, are we, my large question is here, are we just kind of making this up and like seeing what we want to see? Yeah, I think so. I think that's always the case. And I mean, I kind of think that brings us back to the Belichick thing where you're kind of, I don't know, you're not really figuring out like the secret ingredient to the success. And I think like a lot of the overlap with these, these trees is just terminology. And I think, that's just something like guys like us are kind of going to gloss over because we like digging into like the X's nose and play design and all that. But I don't know if like coaches see themselves as like tied to each other as much as we do if that makes sense. Like I don't know if like if you

ask Kyle Shanahan how closely related his offenses to Sean McVease. I think he'll tell you that it's kind of different in a lot of ways. But we just because it's more convenient kind of conflate those two guys and conflate those two coaching trees. So I don't, it's so hard for us from the outside looking in to parse that stuff out. And I think that's part of the reason why we're so bad. And I don't just mean me and Ben, like the media at large and fans, why we are so bad at figuring out which head coaching candidates are actually going to be good, good head coaches.

Because it's all based on stuff that none of us can see and none of us will ever see. Right. Like, I think that Mike McDaniel was hired. I think when Mike McDaniel was hired, if you pulled football consumers from, like, average fans up to like analysts and then to like ownership level, you pull all 32 owners.

Why was Mike McDaniel hired to be the head coached the Dolphins? I think the number one answer you're getting is because, like, he coached under Kyle Shanahan, and he can run the Kyle Shanahan stuff. And then that Dolphins offense was so successful. because of the things that McDaniel did that weren't Shanahanee. Like he kept the Shanahan stuff

that was going to help the dolphins play action, right? A ton of run action, ton of pre-stamp motion to create favorable looks and then changed the stuff that wouldn't have worked as well for 2-0 wouldn't have maximized Tyreek and Waddle.

Right? So like the number one thing that I think, again, like a large sweeping pole of like why was Michael Daniel hired, the number one factor that would have been identified while still kind of accurate, the opposite of it ended up being why Mike McDaniel was so good.

And that's just not, that's not a good situation to be in as a football writer, Stephen. No, it's not. You'd like for, you'd like to be able to get a thumb on a pulse. You'd like for things to be trackable. You'd like for things to be measurable

and expectable. So that way you can make predictions and you don't write headlines that there's no way Matt Patricia's going to fail the way that all the Belvedgic assistants have. You'd like for that to be a thing that you could kind of stick to and get. And this is so challenging in terms of figuring out which coaches,

I think can step up to the highest level, the head coach level and succeed. And I think that right there is why you see a redundancy on systems, terminology, trees, and lineage. And that is the nut graph. It's like, because this is so hard, let's hire a guy that reminds us of Andy Reid. And that's what the Eagles did with Doug Peterson

Like to a T man He was their fourth option And they were like This guy is going to do things Similar to the way that Andy did it And Andy's been pretty good And that feels comfortable That feels safe

That feels like something you can rely on Even though what kind of isn't And so we're just going to take that and go Instead of like Taking the bold stroke of actually casting a wide net Actually interviewing a bunch of different dudes And trying to bring in somebody who's very compelling The last thing I'll say to this

I've been talking for a second here, but like, I say all of this. And then when the Colts hired Jeff Saturday, I was furious. Which, like, Jeff Saturday kind of fits into this and, like, just hire, just cast a big net. Like, hire a guy who you think is the dude. Like, you know, don't, you have to go out of trees. You don't have to go off of systems.

You can interview a ton of guys and bring in the best candidate. And then, obviously, they didn't interview a ton of guys. But Jim Ursay was like, I deeply love Jeff Saturday. I think he'd be a great coach. I think he's an amazing leader. I wanted to coach my team. And I was like, that's ridiculous. And I hate that.

So it's hard. it's like talking about this in theory is all well and good and then you you put it in practice you're kind of like oh i don't like the way that looks a little bit so i think this is my main take after doing all the research for this pot after talking through it with you i think my main takeaway is that there's no such thing as a good or a bad coaching tree and i i think anyone who tries to like rate coaching trees is just wrong like i don't i really don't who's trying to rate coaching trees well no i think it comes up like i think one of the knocks against Bill Belichick outside of the Tom Brady thing,

which I would say is nonsense. He won a playoff game in Cleveland. Like I said, he won 11 games with Matt Castle and he got to the playoffs with Mac Jones. Let's stop the Tom Brady thing. He wouldn't have won six Super Bowls, obviously, but whatever. But I think the second biggest argument against him is the coaching tree thing. It's like, why doesn't he produce better coaches if he's such a good guy? Like we've seen Bill Wash. Like he, Bill Wash is like the father of every offensive coach in the NFL right now.

And I just think that it's just like, happenstance, like it just happened to go that way. Like, it kind of happened because... Wow. Okay, we're changing the title of the pod. Eduardo, new title of the pod. Bill Walsh was happenstance. Let's get Stephen just absolutely crucified by some seven-year-old football fans. I know, yeah.

I'm probably totally wrong about this. But like, Michael Holmgren just happened to stumble upon Brett Farr. And like, that's why his coaches started getting hired because Brett Farr won MVP back to back to back. And everyone was like, holy shit, let's get some of this action. And they hire John Grude and they hire... Andy Reid, and then it just happened to work out, work out. Like, that's what I think. I think, like, coaching tree analysis to me, like, the next Patriot assistant that gets hired,

everyone's going to be like, uh-oh, it's a Belichick assistant, he's going to fail. To me, it's the same thing as like the Ohio State quarterback thing. It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, J.T. Barrett failed because he's J.T. Barrett. Matt Patricia failed because he's, apparently, he's like an asshole who doesn't know how to do anything besides play man covers. Like, that's why he failed. It wasn't because Bill Belichick didn't give him, didn't, like, do something that prepared him to be a head coach.

Yes, that's a great point. I do want to state for the record here and now. The next Patriot assistant to become a head coach will likely be current defense, or inside linebackers coach slash defense coordinator, Gerard Mayo. Gerard's going to be good. I'm going to write an article whenever he gets hired, why Geron Mayo won't flop like the rest of Bill Belichick assistants.

I had a 10-minute conversation with Gerard Mayo on the rigger NFL feed like two seasons ago, and that man is a delight. He's going to be an excellent coach. Looks great in a cutoff hoodie. Important for the Bill Belichick assistant. Love a Gerard Mayo. Okay.

I want to hopefully save this podcast from immediately being, there's no way to know if anybody is good or bad, eat Arby's. By talking through some of the defensive coaches that we actually think are good and what they do is defense a coach that works and if there's anything that's tenable and reliable there. But we will do that after advertisements. Okay. So defensive coaching backgrounds that enter the head coaching ranks and develop a tree, not really a thing.

Current league defensive trees in terms of like schemes and defensive coordinators and like commonly deployed tactics, a thing, right? So there's like head coaching trees and then there's also a defensive coordinator trees, okay? A couple frameworks. We obviously have the Vic Fangio system, which I think is the most popular defensive system right now. Big Fangio, who is the DC of the Miami Dolphins, was previously the DC of the 49ers, so the Bears was the head coach of the Broncos, had as his assistant at one time,

Brennan Staley, who Staley has now kind of produced Joe Barrier and also maybe Rahim Morris, so that one's kind of tricky because Morris was also under Quinn and also coached with Tomlin, with the Bucks, and Jay Gruden was there,

and already this is a mess, as you can tell. Agirot Agero was an assistant for Vic Fangio, he is now the Panthers, D.C., previously was the Broncos, D.C., love Adiro Averro. Ronaldo Hill, who is with the Chargers under Brandon Staley, is now with the Dolphins, and Vic Fangio. You also see Sean Desai, who's now the DC of the Eagles,

previously with the Seahawks, and Clinturt, who is still with the Seahawks. The Beaccarold defensive coaching tree still has on it. Gus Bradley, those suckers are still D.C.s just living it up. Dan Quinn's going to be a head coach at some point probably. Gus Bradley, just chilling with the Colts, just doing the thing, just being Gus. All in cover three.

Yeah, maybe it's good stuff. Robert Salah, who's obviously the head coach of the Jets, and DeBico Ryans, who's now the head coach of the Texans. then you have like you still have belichick you have brian flores who's the dc with the viking now previously with the dolphins and patrick graham who is the dc of the raiders now with josh mcdaniel so you have some like defensive families in terms of coaching trees and lineages that have gone through and you can see the systems right like the beat carol guys all live with critical four man rushes like they have to have a dominant defensive line and they have to rush with four you see

some similarities in the length and the size of their defensive backs the playing with seattle cover three guys. The Vic Fangio dudes, you know, like, people say, like, oh, they're a three, four defense. Not really a three, four defense, but they switch up their front. They run even fronts. They run odd fronts. They run two high systems. Then they rotate to one high post snap. And then the Belichick guys blitz and play man. Like, like, you can, you can paint with broad strokes to describe the schemes and you can identify the, uh, the, uh, the, uh, the, the, the cogentries, like how this, this system was passed down. Now, I brought up Gus Bradley and we chuckled. Right. Like, I brought up like, Renaldo Hill.

and Rinaldo Hill didn't necessarily do a great job with the Chargers and is now with the Dolphins. You know, there are dudes on this list who are of it necessarily running the systems extremely well. And so when you look at that list, the first question is this, do you find a compelling case there for defensive systems being passed down? Like I said, it's much easier to pass down an offensive system than a defensive system. But when you see like all those Fangio coaches or when you see like those Pete Carroll 2010, CIOs, Cs, castoffs now still running defenses, do you look at that and go? Yeah, like the original system that was developed by the grandfather's developed by the bottom of the trees has been passed down successfully to future coaches who are running it well and running it with success later on. Is that compelling to you? Kind of, but not really. I think it's, I think it just goes back to the fact that defense is passive. So I think there's like overlap in terminology and you're going to see a lot some of the same kind of like especially I think you see it a lot in base defense. I think that's where you see a lot of the overlap. for these coaching trees on defense.

But I think when you get to third down and like the passing downs is where you kind of see these guys put their own spin on it. And I think that's kind of true for offense. But I think part of it is that there are only so many coverages, like coverage types. Like I know there, like you say you can say cover three and there's like a billion different ways to play cover three. But you can only really play like cover three. You could like cover one.

You can play two men. You can play quarters. You can play cover six. like there are only like six coverage types like big buckets whereas on offense you can really just do anything like you can you can change you can make a play yours in any way like the play uh that we talk about with that mike mcdainil just spammed over and over and over again the same play with the dolphins last year that wasn't really a a big play type across the NFL like three years before that like the Texans did it some some other teams did it but the the dolphins really made it more

famous whereas like you look at the defensive guys and like vic fangio was just playing cover six and like cover six is in every NFL playbook across the league so i i think it's harder to see the variation you really have to be have like an intimate knowledge of the coverages to see that so it's almost like if you like for instance if you like go on like true media or any of these sites and you just like look at like coverage usage it would be hard to kind of like figure out who the coaching trees are. Whereas I think if you look at offense and like the types of plays they run, you can like fit offensive trees into that,

into that framework. It's just so hard because there are only a couple of plays like on defense. No, I think that that makes a lot of sense where it's like, okay, like the signifying factors, right? Look at the maple leaf go, that's a maple leaf. This is a maple tree. Like the signifying factors of the offensive tree, like look at this motion.

This is the Kyle Shanahan team because of the motion. I very desperately want to make a vine reference. that may be way too niche and old and age me greatly, but it's a vine where he goes, this is an aspen tree. You can tell us an aspen tree because of the way that it is. And that's the whole vine. Like,

that's what you look at with offensive coaching trees. Like, this is a Shanahan system. You can tell that it is because of the way that it is. But the, just one level of, like, the Fangio system down.

Like, if we take Brandon Staley and Sean Desai, who is with Fangio in Chicago, right, for a few years, and Clint Hurd, who was with Sanjio in Chicago for a couple of years. And we go Seahawks defense, Chargers defense,

and then we haven't really seen DeSize Eagles defense yet, but we saw what it looked like when he was at Chicago when he was the D.C. there. Those are some different defenses. Like, they're like, you can take a picture of a three-four front, like of an underfront, you take a picture of an underfront, put him next to each other and be like, see? But that's an underfront.

Like, everybody's running an underfront. This is not enough. This is not as compelling. The other, the thing that I think is really beneficial to this conversation about defensive coaching trees is like, okay, if I take Vic Fangio, Pete Carroll, and Bill Belichick off the board, and you only get their first generation, right? You only get like the branches of their tree.

Pick the best one do you want. Like who's the best one of the group left? Staley, Everow, Gus Bradley, Dan Quinn. Who do you want? Pick any of them. Staley. Staley, okay. Now I'm going to take some of these random one-off DCs, like Lou Aniruma with the Bengals, right?

Wink Morton-Dale with the giant. previously with the Ravens. Steve Spagnola, long time DC of the Giants, head coached the Giants, and then subsequent DC of the Chiefs. Todd Bowles, who like,

you will not catch me near a Todd Bulls is a good head coach conversation, but some Todd Bulls defenses can play. Like, I'll take some of these one-off guys, some of these silo guys. How positive are we that Brandon Staley is better than Lou Aneruma?

How positive are we that he's better as a DC than like Wink Martindale is? Are we positive? No. Not at all. And so now it becomes okay. Like, even if I get a guy off of the tree of the Vic Fangio defense, which like, again, I think the fanjo defense is the most widespread run defense.

It's impacting a ton of people like, you know, Jonathan Gannon with the Eagles, now with the Cardinals ran some Fangio stuff. You know what I'm saying? Everybody's kind of fangifying a little bit. Even if I get like the best product from that tree, it isn't guaranteed to measure up against the guy who was just like randomly the defensive backs coach of the. the Dolphins six years ago that became the defensive coordinator of the Bengals because Zach Taylor couldn't hire anybody and it turns out he's awesome at this.

So what like that to me is the other like really compelling and important part of talking about defensive coaching trees. Like the other guys might just be good. Like the other like Todd Bowles, Steve Spagnolo like freaking Jack Del Rio, right? Like again, like you will not catch me near a Jack Del Rio as a good head coach argument. But some of these guys have just been in the league for. so long and have developed so many good responses to such a variety of things you get from offenses and they've seen the ebbs and the flows and they know the body types that work and the

body types that doesn't and they know how to make their systems go wink martindale like martindale runs the craziest system but he knows how to make it work he's been running it for forever he knows the buttons to press dn p's the titans and the falcons he now's retired but like these dudes like once you've just been in the league for 20 years you're just good at solving problems on defense and whatever flavor of the month young dude innovative guy that pops up like he might be good, but even if he's good, he might not be better than

freaking spags. And you kind of just explain why Belichick is so good, like our theory, at least, he's just been in the league forever and he just knows how to solve these problems. Yeah.

And that, like, so this idea of like, the prevalence of guys, the endurance of guys, right? Like, Bowles gets multiple shots of being a head coach, who knows how long he's going to hold on

to this buck's job. But like, if Todd Bowles became available as a DC, like I would be interested to making that call immediately, right? Jack Del Rio, Dennis Allen, another great one with the Saints who we haven't brought up. Like Dennis Allen, that was his second try of being a head coach. And like, I do not like the way the Saints are running the team.

I don't like the way they're building out that offense. They're losing talent. I don't like the way they manage their cap. Boy, that's good defense. I mean, just what, like, they just got Alante Taylor out here is locking down third round corner, rookie out of Tennessee. Like, the guy can make a defense, right? This, whatever talent it is that guys have on the defensive side of the ball,

I just think that it just does not express itself in the genes, in the passing down through a generation, in the tree the way it does offensively. And I think the reason for that is because defense is so much about solving problems. It's so much about being reactive. It's so much about being adaptive. That you are not benefited by having grown up in one system,

knowing the ins and outs of that system, and not being able to cross-pollinate. I'm making way more biology references than I thought I was going to be going into the spot. I was doing too much gardening. You are not benefited from, only speaking one language, but only having one system. Because the weaknesses of the system are the weaknesses of the system, you need to not only know how to speak a different language and run

different stuff and borrow different stuff, but then you also need to know how to teach it, how to coach it, how to install it. That's what like the stories like Belichick and his little details, Belichick has his attention really matters. Because it's again, it's one thing to be like, we need to run more zone. We need to run quarterback spy stuff. We need to run simulated pressures this game. We need to rotate coverage that game. It's one thing to say like we need to do all these different things. It's another thing to be able to execute. And I don't think you can pass that down. I don't think you can have Bill Belichick be extremely good at that.

And Patrick Graham be a defensive assistant forum for 10 years. And then hire Patrick Graham and expect him to be a really good DC. He was really good at making all these adjustments. And he was there for a decade. And he was a positional coach for a decade. He saw it happen. But there is a identification process. There's a wealth of knowledge, right?

There's having that library that you can reach into of games from the 80s and similar players and solutions and these work and those work. There's an intuition to it that I don't think you can just get, I don't think it can rub off on you over time. I don't think it can be taught in a playbook. Like I think it's like any habit or you don't. And I don't want to say that that phenomenon is not present on the offensive side of the ball. I think it is. I think that there are guys who just get it and guys who have the intuition know how to make the solutions and anticipate the problems.

But there's other ways to skin the cat offensively. There's other avenues to get a good offense out. Whereas defensive, like if you don't have that. Lou Anirumo ability to just be like, I'm really good at getting my players in successful positions. I'm really good at changing my offense to the quarterback that I'm facing. Excuse me, changing my defense to the quarterback I'm facing. If you don't have it, you better have 11 stars, man.

You better have John Gannon's roster with Eagles. Because otherwise, like, I do not see how you're getting a defense off the ground. I do wonder if, like, the nature of offense and defense has to do with the fact that defensive coaches seem to have a harder time sticking on his head coaches. because defense is hard, man. Coaching defense just seems hard. The deck is stacked against you. The rule book is stacked against you.

And I think it almost necessitates that hard-ass personality, that like drill sergeant personality. Like we need to get every detail right because the world is against us. And we screw up one little thing at six, six points. So I do wonder if like that drill sergeant mentality is just natural when you're when you're coaching defense, whereas offense you can be the fun guy. you could be the loosey-goosey guy. You can be Cliff Kingsbury. You can wear visors and stuff. I do think there's something there.

The nature of defense just breeds a certain type of coach. And maybe that certain type of coach just doesn't work as a head coach as often. And also, again, like kind of doing the personality sciences of this all, I think being a defensive coach just breaks you faster than being an offensive coach does. That's not to say I don't see the beer that Kyle Shanahan is growing. And I see the death in Kevin Stefansky's eyes, just like the joy for life leaving Stafansky and Cliff over the years. But I think that like when we talk about head coaches and like what makes head coaches

really good, right, especially when we're in season, we're not talking about what we're talking about right now. We're talking about systems and theories and approaches in motion. And that's we're talking about like, are you managing the game, right? Like so much of the Nick Siriani conversation for the Eagles was giving play, play, calling away to Shane Stuyken so that he could be a fourth down manager, a timeout manager, a clock manager, a field the game manager. right. I think it's easier to hand off the play sheet on offense because of the system stuff

that we're talking about, because of the broad strokes, because of the way that you can kind of just plug and chug some of this stuff, then it is to hand off the play sheet defensively. Like, I think being a good defensive coach so much is about having your exact thumb on the pulse of play calls and a personnel. And okay, if that guy comes off the sideline for the offense on this down in this distance, here's who we're putting in and here's where we're running. It's so particular, it's so minuscule, that I think it is more challenging for defensive coaches to then do the head coach part of the head coach job

and manage the clock and manage the big personalities and call the timeouts and so on and so forth. And that's why when you get a guy like a Tomlin who like, okay, he's got a defensive background, but what does Tomlin do? Let's all the guys call the defense and manage the game. And I think that's where so much of his success has come. And to your point, like you look around the league

at head coaches who still call plays and a lot of them are defensive coordinators. Like, Sean McDermott. Well, I don't know if Sean McDermott didn't do it, but he was, there was a conversation about him taking over. Brandon Staley, Dennis Allen, Todd Bowles. There's one other one that I'm forgetting. But like a lot of the defensive coordinators like hold on to that.

Because like you said, I think it is harder to give up the headset just because I think there's like a certain pride in calling plays. Like there's, I brought up this book earlier. There's like a segment from that the education of a coach, the book about Bill Belichick. And this is after Belichick had left New York. He had left Bill Parcells for the Cleveland job. And he had gotten fired. He came back and served as Bill Parcell's defensive coordinator once again.

And there was a game. And Belichick really wanted to call a blitz. And Parcells was against it. And Belichick ended up calling it anyway. And it worked. And then over the headset, that like Parcells was like, oh, yeah, I bet you're such a genius. Oh, it worked out.

That's why you failed as a head coach. And like, apparently that was just like an awkward moment for the whole staff. And it was like a moment that like shaped Belichick and how he, he handled his assistance. But I think like that's part of it. I just think there's an edge when you're a defensive coordinator. And like you said, giving up that that power of calling the plays is just tough. And doing that and weighing the responsibilities you have as a play caller with the head coaching responsibilities just seems like so hard. And especially on defense, because like we've been saying,

it's so reactionary and you have to switch things up every week and it's hard to just have a system that you can just rely on. It's tough to weigh those responsibilities. Yeah. This is by far the episode we've done the most where we're kind of like, man, this is crazy. Anyway, Like, this is, this is a tough one. It was one that I was really looking forward to tackling. No, bad, bad puns now. That's three in a row episodes with bad puns, I feel like. So I was looking forward to tackling it.

Hello. But it's, I think it is a legitimate phenomenon that defensive trees just don't break into head coaching ranks nearly as well, nearly as successfully than offensive trees do. And defensive trees aren't as strong even at the coordinator level than like offensive trees and offensive systems. I think that's a phenomenon that's tough to argue. I think that is happening, period. Why?

I think you and I have got seven different explanations here over the course of a 50-minute pod, and I definitely think we're somewhere, but I don't know how, I don't know the final answer on this. I don't know the result. I don't know the landing point. And that's what brings me back to Bill Belichick and his coaching tree and just saying, like, when I look at the fact that Belichick's defensive defense, assistance end up not being great head coaches anywhere, I struggle to feel any different about

Bill Belichick than I did previously. Because once I start looking at defensive coaching trees overall, like there's just nothing consistent, there's nothing standard. It's very hard to build any sort of defensive coaching system. The fact that Belichick hasn't, doesn't impact me too much when I think about like his legacy or I think about like his particular system, it just makes me realize how hard it is to get this defensive lineage generated. Yeah, but I think the that we haven't really found a solid landing spot is a landing spot because I do think people apply these frameworks to like evaluating head coaching hires. And I just think we need to tear those down. And it's it's a cop out maybe as an analyst who's like paid to write about these things and

make these predictions. Like it's easy for me to be like, aha, I would like I couldn't have gotten that Matt Patricia article right. Like there's no way I would have gotten a good take out of that. But I just think that's the case. I think it's impossible to know. And, and, and, I'll repeat what I said earlier. Like the next Belichick assistant that gets hired, I'm not going to write him off just because he's a Belichick assistant. I just don't think it matters. I don't think Matt Patricia matters for when Gerard Mayo gets hired.

Right. We can't tell who the guys are that have the secret sauce, especially on the defensive side of the ball. We also can't rely on lineage and coaching trees to tell us anything. With all that said, Gerard Mayo is going to be a good head coach. Whoever go hire Gerard. I like him a lot.

It seems like a nice guy. that's it for us on defensive coaching trees and why the Bill Belichick tree in particular sucks. We do these shows every single Friday where we kind of try to tackle something really big and really scary and really tough and see if we can get somewhere. And it's been a lot of fun.

Thank you to everybody who's left reviews and said nice things to us. As I said on the last couple of pods, we are soliciting those reviews because we have fragile self images. And so far, my image is being lifted by the reviews. So thank you, everybody. Thank you to producer Eduardo Ocampo,

as well as the additional production supervision provided by Arjuna Ramcapul and Connor Nevins. Next week, Stephen, I've been eyeballing Can Sean Payton save Russ? It feels, I don't know, is it too early? Do we want to wait for some trainee camp stuff? Or it doesn't feel like it's time?

Let's just do it. Let's just do it. Can Sean Payton save Russ next week, Friday on the ring NFL show? Until then, take care.