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Brandon Staley built the NFL's most modern defense with the Rams. Will it work with the Chargers?
A closer look at his plan on third down might give us some clues.
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Brandon Staley built the NFL's most modern defense with the Rams. Will it work with the Chargers?
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Steven Ruiz
May 27, 2021 9:57 am ET
If Brandon Staley wasn’t a name you were familiar with before he was named the head coach of the Los Angeles Chargers, you probably don’t spend a lot of time on the Internet. It’s rare for young defensive coordinators to make a name for themselves in the age of the Offensive Genius™ but Staley, in his first season as a pro play-caller, managed to become one of the central characters of the 2020 NFL season … for football nerds, at least.
There was a hefty amount of ink spilled on the young coordinator leading a Rams defense that finished first in just about every advanced metric out there. We wrote about Staley more than a few times last season. The Athletic’s Robert Mays talked to Staley and penned a piece on his overall defensive philosophy. And Pro Football Focus’ Seth Galina and Diante Lee each had in-depth breakdowns on his scheme. Again, there was no shortage of content focused on a guy who was coaching D-3 ball just a few years earlier.
I’d argue that we haven’t seen a defensive scheme get this much press since Pete Carroll’s Cover 3-based scheme was terrorizing the league early last decade. But that defense was lauded for its tactical simplicity and, mostly, for the players who made it famous. Staley’s defense, on the other hand, has been lauded more for its variety of fronts and coverages despite the fact that, like Seattle, there was no shortage of superstar talent on the roster.
There has been so much written on the scheme over the past eight months and yet there’s still plenty of ground to cover.
For the most part, the spotlight has been fixed on Staley’s early-down approach, which makes sense: That’s where the most interesting (or hotly debated, at least) philosophical questions are asked and answered. On third down, run-pass splits don’t matter. And numbers in the box and coverage shells are mostly serving a cosmetic purpose. But even if Staley’s third-down stuff doesn’t provide us with answers to the big-picture questions we have about the sport, it probably deserves more attention given 1) how good the Rams were on the all-important down and 2) what it can tell us about the 38-year-old’s future as an NFL head coach.
My guess is that as NFL defenses continue to evolve, they’ll all look similar to the one we saw the Rams run on early downs in 2020. It’s a copycat league and, based on what we’re seeing at the lower levels of the sport, it’s just the direction defenses are going in.
So if Staley is going to stand out and continue to cultivate this reputation as one of the league’s brightest young minds, it will be his passing-down calls that make it happen.
Before we get started: A brief review of Staley’s early down stuff
If you somehow managed to miss out on all the Staley content that was produced during the 2020 season, I’d suggest going back and reading it all. But, in order to save you time, I’ll use the words of another up-and-comer in the coaching world, Southern Miss assistant coach Dante Bartee, who has become a bit of a cult figure in the coaching community. Here’s Bartee explaining his approach to defending run-pass options…Video Player
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Well, Bartee is a college coach, so his question is worth asking every week and the answer will change based on the opponent. That is not the case in the NFL, where essentially every team is most efficient when passing the ball. So, what did Staley do? He presented those light boxes at a league-high rate, per Next Gen Stats, and rotated from two-high pre-snap to one-high post-snap at the second-highest rate, per Pro Football Focus.
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Now, Bartee was talking about defending RPO’s, which aren’t as ubiquitous at the pro level, but Staley told Mays that during his days as a college defensive coordinator, the RPO was always his biggest concern and he brought that mentality with him as he climbed the ranks to the NFL. And given how much of a role play-action plays in the superior efficiency of the passing game — if you look at passes without run action (so no play-action or RPO), those plays yielded a negative EPA during the 2020 NFL season — it’s just as big of an issue. The run/pass dilemma is still there; the mechanisms are just a little different.
Obviously, the key to defending a play-action pass effectively is timely diagnosis. And Staley has structured his defense in a way to give his coverage players more time to read run or pass. As Staley explained to Mays, that starts up front, where the goal is to clog everything up inside and muddy the picture for the running back.
As PFF’s Lee put it, “Staley gets run fits akin to what you’d expect out of base fronts by having his deep safety come off the roof and into the box.” The Rams were getting the best of both worlds. The run was being defended effectively while the secondary was provided ample time to diagnose what the offense was doing. The run-pass conflict was still there; the decisions just didn’t have to be made in a split second.
This probably sounds like a common sense thing to do but it’s not really a commonly used approach to structuring defense at the NFL level. It’s really just Staley and his former boss Vic Fangio playing defense like this right now, but I would expect that to change in the very near future. Maybe as soon as the 2021 season.
Why it’s going to be everywhere soon
Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports
The last defensive scheme to proliferate the league was Seattle’s single-high defense that had every team looking for its own Earl Thomas, Kam Chancellor and Richard Sherman. That proved easier said than done and the teams that hired Carroll assistants away to build a Legion of Boom of their own largely failed. The most successful replica came in San Francisco in 2019 when the 49ers were loaded with talent at all three levels. It turns out that Seattle’s success last decade was largely due to talent.
Staley’s scheme may be more adaptable. Not because the Rams defense he coached wasn’t immensely talented. Donald and Ramsey might be the two best defensive players in the league right now. But the early-down stuff we’ve talked about wasn’t really dependent on their extraordinary gifts. On first and second down, Ramsey was playing a deep quarter most of the time. Donald was lined up like a run-stuffing defensive end in an old 3-4 defense. Having great players in those spots is obviously a good thing, but the list of players who can adequately fill those roles is long.
There were, of course, other good players on the defense. But players like Michael Brockers and Troy Hill are available every offseason. In fact, the Rams literally made both players available this offseason. If NFL defenses around the league want to replicate the stuff Staley was doing on first and second down that inspired all of those articles about him, they don’t necessarily need a world-devouring 3-technique or lockdown corner in order to do so.
Third down — the Rams led the league in third-down success rate — was a different story …
Third down is where Staley utilized Donald and Ramsey
Robert Hanashiro-USA TODAY Sports
Unfortunately for those defenses trying to capture Staley’s magic, having Donald and Ramsey at his disposal on third down was a massive advantage. And those two were probably the biggest reason the Rams were so damn good on third down last season.
The Rams mostly played some form of zone coverage behind a four-man rush on first and second down, but on third down, Staley got aggressive. The Rams rushed five or more at a top-10 rate and played significantly more man coverage with only one safety back deep.
Of course, it’s a lot easier to play man coverage without safety help on the outside when you have Ramsey locking down the opponent’s best receiver on key downs. Most defensive coordinators do not have the luxury of saying, You’ve got D.K. Metcalf or DeAndre Hopkins one-on-one and not being laughed at.
And the attention paid to Donald by the protection unit really did make things easier for his pass rush mates. It also allowed Staley to get more creative with his pressure designs. Donald is a defensive tackle who moves like a running back, allowing Staley to line him up on one side of the offensive line only to stunt two or three gaps over and still affect the quarterback before he gets rid of the ball.
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This unbalanced front — referred to as a “Load” front — was one of L.A’s go-to looks on passing downs.
Donald was typically lined up just outside of the offensive tackle to the side with three rushers, which really limits an offense’s protection options.
One of the Rams’ more effective pressures had Donald just run directly into the center and set a pick for the interior rusher who was looping in behind him.
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The Rams also used a lot of “5-0” looks which forced the offense to check into a man protection more often than not.
Donald would line up as a 3-technique and just do typical Aaron Donald things, collapsing the pocket and forcing the quarterback to move away from him and right into the waiting arms of a linebacker who looped around to the edge opposite of Donald.
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It’s a clever little design but it’s not nearly as effective without the “Aaron Donald is unblockable” thing going on. Having good players makes coaching a lot easier.
But it wasn’t just those two powering the Rams’ dominant third-down defense
Having said that, it was still very apparent on tape how well-coached the Rams defense was in 2020. It was as if the entire coverage unit was operating with one collective brain. Or maybe they were just really good at communicating. But either way, it was downright beautiful to watch them pass off routes to one another.Video Player
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Donald and Ramsey were the marquee names on the roster but the generically named John Johnson, now a member of the Cleveland Browns, may have been the most important player on the field. For most defenses, it’s a linebacker wearing the green dot, signifying the in-helmet radio device connected to the coach’s headset, but Johnson, a safety/dime linebacker, was that player for the Rams.
Michael Chow-Arizona Republic
Beyond that responsibility, Johnson was really at the heart of everything that made the 2020 Rams defense so interesting. He was typically that safety adding to the box late to defend the run. And he was the safety looking to cut off crossing routes, which might be the key to pass defense in today’s NFL.
If I had to pick out one coverage to represent the Rams’ defense philosophy, it would be what’s known as “Cover 8” in Fangio’s terminology, which I assume Staley also uses. Cover 8 is a hybrid coverage where the defense plays Cover 2 to the strong side of the formation and Cover 4 to the weak side. You might know it as “Cover 6” or “Quarter-Quarter-Half.”
(Note: I’m not 100% sure about the rules for this coverage. This is my best guess based on film.)
It was in this coverage that Johnson really shined. He’d typically line up on the weak side with Ramsey, who’d be locked in on the No. 1 receiver as long as he didn’t run a shallow route. While it may have looked as if Johnson was there to help Ramsey in coverage, he actually had his eyes on the other side of the formation, looking to cut off any vertical or crossing routes.
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Against sets with two receivers to both sides, Johnson would initially have his eyes on the No. 2 receiver to his side and if that receiver stayed shallow, he’d look to the other side to defend any crossers.
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In his chat with Mays, Staley talked about creating “overlap” in his defense, and you can see an example of that here. The receiver running the crosser has to run through the linebacker, whose job is to make him “run the hump” as he delivers him to Johnson.
There’s a somewhat similar relationship between the slot defender and the safety opposite of Johnson, with the slot defender delivering the No. 2 receiver to the safety, who would pick that receiver up if he ran deep. The Rams safety to the Cover 2 side wasn’t really concerned with getting out to the sideline because teams rarely throw vertical routes to the No. 1 receiver in trips. According to Sports Info Solutions, only 277 throws were targeted at the No. 1 receiver in trips when he ran a deep perimeter route (more than 15 air yards). So it happened about once a game. It’s just a very hard throw to make.
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We mentioned earlier that the Rams were getting the best of both the 1-high and 2-high worlds in the run game, and the same is true here. The middle of the field is cut off but the seams are not left vulnerable as they are in true 1-high coverage.
Staley’s defensive philosophy is very much based on the idea of creating as many 2-on-1s as possible. And he does that by conceding unattractive real estate to the offense so he can load up in the areas the offense does want to attack. He is not alone in that pursuit, but his playbook is so deep, he can adjust week to week to take on whatever challenges the next opponent might present. Those adjustments are made based on the talent he has at his disposal, as well, so some adjustments will be required as he applies this scheme to the Chargers roster.
Staley created a uniquely modern NFL defense
We’ve seen quite the evolution on the defensive side over the last few years as teams have found ways to better defend spread offenses, and it’s quite clear that Saley is following that evolution closely.From his usage of fronts meant to reduce numbers in the run box to better defend the pass, to his various coverage concepts designed to take away the routes that modern passing attacks lean on most heavily, to his usage of protection-dictating fronts to make pressuring the quarterback a little bit easier on his pass rushers, Staley seems to have created the NFL’s most modern defense.
That was the case in 2020, at least. Will we see something similar now that Staley is taking on a new challenge as head coach of the Chargers?
What it might look like with the Chargers
Unfortunately, Staley can’t bring Donald and Ramsey along with him, which will certainly make his job more difficult. But it’s not as if the Chargers are devoid of blue chip talent. Joey Bosa may not be Donald but he’s an elite edge rusher and if you’re looking for how he might be used, you can just re-visit the film of the 2018 Bears defense that was led by Khalil Mack.And Staley will not have to find a replacement for his new John Johnson with all-world talent Derwin James already on the roster. I’m just assuming James will play the same role Johnson did, but based on what Staley had to say about his new safety on Cris Collinsworth’s podcast, he might have a more expanded role.
If James does spend more time as a slot corner, I’d expect Staley to get even more creative with his pressure designs. He was more than willing to send a slot corner after the quarterback a year ago, as Ramsey and Troy Hill, who shared time in the slot, combined for 38 pass-rush snaps, per Sports Info Solutions. The Browns were the only other team with two defensive backs ranking in the top-20 in pass-rush snaps. James, when healthy, has been the most disruptive defensive back in the league when rushing the passer.
Staley’s arrival should help unlock 2019 first-round pick DT Jerry Tillery in the same way it did for Leonard Floyd with the Rams. Tillery is bigger than Floyd, weighing nearly 50 more pounds than him, and plays a different position but he put up exceptional times in agility and speed drills at the combine, which will serve him well when running those stunts that serve as the foundation for Staley’s pass rush plans.
There isn’t a Jalen Ramsey on this roster, but the Chargers have some decent talent at the cornerback position. Michael Davis has earned a cult following on Football Twitter, Chris Harris might actually be healthy this year and the team drafted Assante Samuel Jr. in the second round. That should be good enough.
The big concern is defensive line depth. Outside of Donald, the Rams d-line didn’t feature a lot of household names but guys like Brockers and Sebastion Joseph-Day were doing a lot of dirty work to clog up rush lanes, which allowed Staley to live in a two-high safety world. In order to employ similar tactics, the Chargers will be leaning heavily on a 32-year-old Linval Joseph and the unproven Justin Jones.
The Chargers defense will not be as good as the Rams defense was last season. I can say that confidently. But I also feel confident saying that this defense will be prepared to take on whatever challenges a modern offense might present and that’s a pretty good start.
