Rams hope new defensive boss Brandon Staley is a quick fixer...

Rams hope new defensive boss Brandon Staley is a quick fixer

[www.dailynews.com]

It’s not a souffle or a roast duck. It’s football. The prep time is overrated.

When Brandon Staley was coaching at John Carroll, there was no spring practice. At Hutchinson Junior College at Kansas, players constantly rushed through the turnstile, none available for more than two years.

“When I got hired by the Bears, Khalil Mack showed up seven days before the first regular-season game,” Staley said. “And that was one of his best games. People wonder about it, but the competition starts when everything goes live.”

Stanley is the 37-year-old defensive coordinator of the Rams. He was Mack’s position coach in Chicago. When he followed Vic Fangio and Ed Donatell to Denver, Von Miller was in his linebackers’ room.

“I told him he could coach 20 years and not have two guys like that,” Donatell said.

Instead, Staley now works with Aaron Donald, who could be roused from a midnight snooze and still sack quarterbacks.

Donald says he wants to see Staley’s defensive alignments “out there on the grass,” not just on teleconferences. But with no live OTAs or mini-camps and maybe a truncated summer session, Staley will be operating under a running clock and a tight lens. They say trust is built slowly. Not here.

“The first thing he does with those guys is establish his knowledge,” said Donatell, who became Denver’s defensive coordinator when Fangio became the head man. “Then he connects with people. The great players are looking for somebody with credibility and it doesn’t matter who it is. That won’t be a problem for Brandon.

“He’s prepared. When he interviewed with us in Chicago, he showed he’d been following Vic not just for a couple of years but for 10. He can frame problems quickly, while everything is going on, and address them. I know (Rams’ coach) Sean McVay is unique, but Brandon will be a good match.”

“Aaron would play well with my wife Amy coaching him,” said Staley, who added that, as a schoolteacher, she often coaches him. When she heard him use the sloppy expression “aiiight” in too many remote conversations, she called him out.

Like McVay, Staley was a high school quarterback, in Perry, Ohio. He also quarterbacked at Dayton, not far from McVay’s Miami of Ohio.

Unlike McVay, Staley took the scenic route to the NFL. He was an assistant at Northern Illinois at 24, went to St. Thomas (MN) at 27, was at Hutchinson at 28, was a Tennessee graduate assistant at 30.

Then Staley ducked out of prime time and spent three of the next four years at John Carroll, with a pit stop at James Madison. He was ready to join his John Carroll coach, Tom Arth, at Tennessee-Chattanooga when the Bears called.

“Other than Jon Gruden, who played quarterback here, Brandon was the best at putting stuff on the greaseboard,” said ex-Dayton coach Mike Kelly, “although it was a chalkboard back then.”

Joe Novak, the Northern Illinois coach, made Staley a defensive backfield coach for the same reason, because Staley could see all the pieces moving.

“When a young kid wants to get into coaching,” Novak said. “I always ask them, ‘Can you live without it?’ Because if he can, he probably should. I don’t think Brandon can live without it, and he shouldn’t.”

“I’ve been able to coach all 22 positions,” Staley said. “But I just grew up fascinated with all of it. I was drinking coffee and reading the paper every morning in the first grade. What I’m going to show the players is that I’m out there competing as much as they are.”

Hidden in that curriculum vitae is a scrimmage against Hodgkin’s lymphoma when Staley was 24. He coached for NIU through it all. His dad Bruce, who was his high school coach, is also a cancer survivor. His mom Linda was not. She died three years before Brandon got sick.
Staley might be the new kid, but the block has changed. Only four of the 11 defensive Rams who started in the Super Bowl in 2019 are still here. You might ask what Wade Phillips did to lose his job, since the Rams were fourth in sacks and seventh in rush defense (per carry). But the bad games were really bad (Tampa Bay, Dallas, Baltimore, San Francisco) and the third down and red zone stats were below the NFL average.

McVay surely remembered a back-alley night in Chicago, 2018, when the Bears picked Jared Goff four times and dealt him a 19.1 passer rating in a 15-6 win. Staley’s resume was built by association. This job could go any which way, but forget the prep time. He’s been in training camp all his life.