Edited out about half of this--so it is not 100% coherent

because half of article was about Mcvay's offense---Jourdan did great writing this

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Sean McVay, Brandon Staley and their clashing football evolutions that could shape the direction of the NFL

Jourdan Rodrigue Sep 9, 2021 125
THOUSAND OAKS, Calif. —

The team’s plan for the truncated “camp” period was to call as fully live of practices as possible under the NFL’s protocols because they were not only introducing the new defense, but also getting three new coordinators up to speed and shaking the cobwebs out of players’ minds and legs after an all-virtual spring. That included a live installation of first-time defensive coordinator Brandon Staley’s defense that had only previously taken place over video conferencing. The coaches planned practices so that more periods than usual featured first-team offense against the first-team defense; “Best on best,” some called it.

“We were trying to learn a new defense … (and) we didn’t have an offseason,” said defensive backs coach Ejiro Evero. “Everything was happening just really fast. Even though the players had done the whole virtual offseason, it’s not the same as going on the field, walking through it, talking through it, and actually doing it live and in person.”


It was the first time the Rams’ offense had truly seen Staley’s defense outside of a computer screen. Some themes were familiar — especially the core constructs pulled from Broncos coach Vic Fangio’s defense; the same defense (led by Fangio then as the Bears defensive coordinator) that truly flummoxed McVay’s own system for the first time in 2018, and certain elements of which were used against him over and over again afterward, including in the Super Bowl by the New England Patriots. Others — and particularly the evolution of Staley’s plan for the secondary — were not familiar at all in an NFL setting.

“The first week last year, it was seeing for the first time how a lot of our (offensive) concepts, things that we were running at the time … we had to learn, ‘These things aren’t hitting the same way they did before,’” Rams receiver Cooper Kupp said. “It was definitely frustrating — but it was so good. ”


“My initial reaction to it was ‘This is good @#$%&’, to be frank,” said John Wolford, the Rams’ backup quarterback who ran a live scout team against the starting defense through the 2020 season — which means, of course, that he has the unique experience of taking perhaps more “live” snaps against Staley’s defense than any other quarterback in the NFL, including starters, even now.

“I knew they were going to be good,” he added. “I drafted them on my fantasy team, just because I knew.”




“(The 6-1) … it’s something that we’ve seen show up a handful of times in the first three weeks,” McVay said in late September 2019, “and it’s something that I think we can expect to see as we move forward.”

It didn’t get much easier from there. The Rams’ 2019 season sputtered to an end without a playoff appearance, an offense ranked No. 11 in scoring and a defense ranked No. 17. As the team parted ways with an all-time great defensive coordinator in Wade Philips, who helped mentor McVay during his first three seasons as an NFL head coach, a few high-ranking Rams personnel pulled McVay into a meeting and told him, “Go find your own ‘Sean McVay’.”

It was then-outside linebackers coach Chris Shula who slipped McVay the name, “Brandon Staley.” Shula, first and foremost, knew that McVay coveted the same Fangio-brewed poison that beat him — beat the best offense in the NFL — twice, no flukes. And earlier in his career, Staley had recommended Shula for a job at John Carroll University, a tiny Division-III school in Ohio that had, between 2013-16, actually become its own petri dish that helped build 2020’s best defense.

Shula was the defensive coordinator at John Carroll in 2014, when Staley was at James Madison, and when Shula left for an assistant position with the Chargers in 2015, Staley took over once more. They stayed in touch and compared notes from time to time. Each season, Staley plotted ways to stop the spread-out, no-huddle attack from rival school Mount Union, running his strategy and designs through versatile defensive lineman Frank Pines and all-around defensive back Jovon Dawson the same way he would with Aaron Donald and Ramsey a few years later.

“I always thought he was really good, really smart,” Shula said. “I thought they would hit it off if they got in a room together, and they did.”

defensive coaches stood in a cluster on the upper level of the barn and talked about Staley’s defense, one half-jokingly describing it as “death by 10,000 papercuts.”

That system, in essence, bets an offensive coordinator and a quarterback will mess up before the defense does and presents pitfalls for them to do so. First and foremost, the coverage actually dictates the front, instead of the other way around. Staley, in a slight evolution from the initial scheme that troubled McVay, runs a lot of 5-1 fronts while playing gap-and-a-half against the run. In fact, the Rams led the league in “light boxes” (six or fewer defenders in the box), utilizing it on 67 percent of defensive snaps, according to a TruMedia query.

The lighter box may invite more run plays, but the Rams effectively stifle those (they allowed 3.8 yards per rush attempt, third-best in the league in 2020), which in turn can set up more difficult passing downs — and that’s where a quarterback can run into trouble. A QB will certainly be familiar with the two-high look the Rams show prior to a snap, but more often than not, it doesn’t stay that way. Staley deploys post-snap rotations into actual coverage out of a two-high shell, which “muddies the water” for a quarterback who needs to throw the ball further downfield after an unsuccessful run play.

Facing a new look post-snap, a quarterback has safeties playing from depth, with pressure bearing down in the form of three-time Defensive Player of the Year Donald, then Ramsey and Williams on the back end in a shifted coverage and Leonard Floyd around the edge. Under those conditions, a quarterback’s highest-probability throw becomes a checkdown or similar short pass. The Rams’ defense ranked No. 7 in the NFL in pass attempts of 20-plus air yards last season, and were first in the league in stopping these explosive passes when they did occur.

The defense fully commits to all of this, which usually means offensive coordinators have to accept short-yardage runs in bulk quantities, small-ball throws and perhaps — if the defense can’t get off the field immediately — longer drives that open wider opportunities for error. Staley bets that an offense will mess up somehow when forced to stack up agonizing little pieces of yardage instead of attaining a back-breaking explosive-yards play. He bets that they won’t be able to bear it, enough to where they overcommit and the defense can either take the ball away or force the stop. Ten thousand papercuts.

“I think, what they are getting at,” Staley said, “is that we don’t let people play the way they prefer to play against us. And we are very comfortable in deciding how the game’s terms are going to be.

“We want to challenge people’s discipline and patience every week. We force them to have a high level of execution to beat us. And most people do not have the caliber of consistency in their execution to sustain success versus us. They may do it for a drive, but they will not do it for a game. And we adjust so quickly, and we can pounce on your plan so quickly, that I feel like what you may perceive as there, it won’t be there for long.”

When Staley began his tenure with the Rams, he communicated his system macro-to-micro and flooded meetings with particulars. He also framed every piece of his system as a “why” — not, “this is what we do when routes go horizontal, this is what we do against a bunch formation,” but, “this is why.”

Staley likes to say that he doesn’t aim to make things easy for a player; he aims to make things right for a player. For the Rams defenders, that meant even more “why,” and more details.

“You’re getting them ready for this really deep education in football, where they can really anticipate. You’re teaching them the game and how these parts come together,” Staley said.

Especially when it comes to countering the quarterback.

Right away, Wolford noticed the defense reading him differently. Watching him differently. A bit unnervingly, even, although he expected some of it from parsing tape through the spring. Still, actually quite unnerving, because as time passed and the defensive players got more comfortable, they began adjusting to the route combinations they knew the quarterback would throw based on the steps in his dropback; such as, a one-step drop meant one of the three routes that could come of it within the Rams’ offensive structure at the time.

“Three-step drop likely meant an intermediate throw. Five-step drop from the gun, they’re going to be deeper,” Wolford recited.

“I always thought that when you play with vision on the quarterback, you’re dropping the landmarks — parts of the field, vision on the quarterback, and break,” Shula said. “I always thought it was either one or the other: You’ll either match routes, and you look at the routes you’re matching, or you have to play ‘visual’ and now it’s true landmark-based. But we kind of do both — we’re matching routes, but I’ve got to see the quarterback and break.”

“Now, transitioning to this defense where there’s a lot more zone,” Evero said, “we can really implement, ‘We get this drop, or we get this action from a quarterback, or this run-action — these are the concepts you’re defending,’ instead of thinking about the 100 different things the offense can do — in a split second you can narrow it down to two or three things.”

But for the quarterbacks, it wasn’t enough to know what the defense knew, because the picture changed anyway. And it changed a lot. The two-high shell rotated into a different coverage post-snap more often than not (the Rams and the Fangio-led Broncos rotated their safeties from two-high more than any other team in the NFL last season).

By proxy, the quarterbacks who cannot process post-snap or troubleshoot problems in real time are exposed. But even when the quarterback believes he has tells from defensive backs’ eyes and feet, the challenge remains: He cannot always be sure that what he thought the actual coverage was, was actually the actual coverage.

“You start taking those reps and you go, ‘The picture is muddy. Guys don’t feel like it’s a traditional Cover 3 or Cover 4, guys are playing visually and relating to the quarterback and the routes,’” Wolford said.

“There’s a lot of texture to how we play that a lot of people are scared of,” Staley said, “because it’s not a lot of ‘always’ and ‘never.’ It’s kind of like, ‘well, it depends.’ And people are scared of that.”

Staley’s defense even works to turn one of the main quarterback advantages most heavily and historically built into McVay’s system — the play-action — into a disadvantage. The Rams, with Goff, did not rank lower than fifth in the NFL since 2017 in rate of play-action use.

“I don’t think people understand — the quarterback in a lot of play-actions is blind for about a second,” said Cody Alexander, a former Baylor defensive assistant (and current high school football coach in Texas) and author of the “Match Quarters” literary series in which he studies and translates the modernization of college and NFL defenses.

“If you have a predetermined pre-snap mental model of what the field looks like, and you kind of have a perception of where safeties are, where they’re moving — but it’s two-high, and the next moment I turn around and I’ve got weak rotation or I turn around and it’s strong rotation or the safety is now completely moved — now I have to re-set my mental model,” Alexander said. “And with the way the front structure (and pressure) is built, your processing has to be so much faster.”

Because a safety doesn’t have to necessarily account for a gap when a defensive front successfully plays gap-and-a-half, he can continue to play downfield instead of overcommitting into the box and opening the opportunity for the ball to be placed behind him, and that marries into the best way for a defensive back to counter the play-action, in Alexander’s mind — which is to play from depth, as Fangio’s safeties traditionally have (and now Staley’s, too).

“(It’s saying), ‘We’re going to leverage play-action against you,” Alexander said.

“But then also, (it’s saying), we’re going to change the picture post-snap so that what you see when you take that ball, when you turn your back to us and then turn back around, you’re going to have to figure it all back out. And I think those two things, in particular, are what is so genius about the system. It changes the picture post-snap, but also it leverages the defense so it’s not going to just get abused by play-action.”

This was especially difficult for the Rams to counter, because of the way Goff executed his play-action: By vast majority under center. Through the course of that action, the quarterback’s back normally turns to the defense. If the picture changes post-snap, he must figure it out again after flipping back around. Running play-action out of shotgun, however, allows the quarterback’s eyes to stay on the defense (yet the issue here, said Evero, is that it’s harder to “sell” the run). Goff ran just 1 percent of his league-high play-action passes on early downs out of shotgun over the last two seasons (three snaps out of 487 qualifying), according to TruMedia. The rest were from under center.

For all their juxtaposition, perhaps the biggest connector between these two systems is that just like the Shanahan/McVay offense, in Staley’s scheme, so much of one play looks identical to another pre-snap. In Staley, and over and over again those first couple of weeks, McVay watched his own evolved advantages get used against him.

But that’s what McVay wanted — the thing that could best beat him, in his own building and on his fields every day, in hopes that it would make him better.

“I think (Sean) is aware of what you need to defend, and how you need to defend it. And I think he was keenly aware of what it takes to defend (his own) system,” Staley said. “You start with the fundamental premise of the marriage of the run and the pass game — that’s the fundamental premise of their system. If you are going to design a defense, how do you design a defense that mitigates both of those components? How they run the football, and how they throw the football off of that run-action.

“And I think that’s probably where our worlds collided.”
McVay’s operation has drawn a reputation over the last few seasons as a one-and-done stop, or close to that, for offensive coaches.

His former assistant receivers/quarterbacks coach, Zac Taylor, coaches the Bengals. LaFleur just beat McVay in the divisional round of the playoffs in Green Bay, before losing to Super Bowl winners Tampa Bay in the NFC Championship Game. This offseason, the Seahawks hired McVay pupil Shane Waldron as their new offensive coordinator, and already appear to be running similar concepts. Liam Coen, the Rams’ assistant receivers/quarterbacks coach after Taylor, is now the offensive coordinator at Kentucky.

Team decision-makers seem to want the system — one that has been to the Super Bowl three times in the last five years, but has never won it — and pulling candidates directly out of a staff that runs it is so far the direct methodology. The Falcons, after losing both Shanahan and LaFleur, and having ended the Dan Quinn era, hired Arthur Smith this offseason — who worked with LaFleur in Tennessee and will call the same offense now in Atlanta. O’Connell (McVay’s offensive coordinator) was up for the Chargers offensive coordinator job early in the hiring process, multiple sources said at the time — but unlike he did with LaFleur years ago, McVay blocked the lateral move. As the league has trended toward offense, the Shanahan tree in all of its pollinations has trended with it.

But this year, following the success of the 2020 Rams’ defense — and the nature of its design — Staley was the “one-and-done,” the first defensive assistant under McVay to be hired for a head coaching role. He accepted the Chargers head coaching job in January.

Similarly to how various teams have pulled from McVay’s staff in recent years in an effort to capture (and then replicate) the offensive system, already they are trying to pull from Staley’s, too, whether by hiring coaches from the Rams’ 2020 staff or by some shared background.

“We’ve seen it from the offense for years, just because we got here in 2017 and we were so good on offense,” Shula said. “It’s been interesting. Zac Taylor is here, two years a head coach. Matt LaFleur. All of the guys. But this year is kinda cool. … This is really the first year that guys have really branched off and coached for another team (from) our defensive staff.”

LaFleur hired former Rams linebackers coach Joe Barry as his defensive coordinator (and also interviewed Evero for the job). Former Rams director of college scouting Brad Holmes, now the general manager in Detroit, hired Pleasant. The Eagles’ new defensive coordinator, Jonathan Gannon, has hinted at pulling from some elements of the Rams’ 2020 defense. The Bears’ new defensive coordinator and former Fangio assistant Sean Desai can be expected to continue the components of that system that work, which intersect, of course, with Staley’s own philosophy at several points. Morris, now back with McVay (and this time in Los Angeles), will run largely the same defense at its core, although he’ll certainly pull at some threads in an effort to keep pushing the scheme forward as others try to solve it.

“I thought it was very telling that Mike Zimmer hired Karl Scott from Alabama (as a defensive backs coach),” Alexander noted. Zimmer has pulled from Alabama’s match-zone concepts for years, but hiring Scott could be an escalation of that approach — a theory also supported by Minnesota’s recent investment in run-stuffing defensive tackles who may help present lighter boxes.

“(Robert) Saleh tried to hire Jeremy Pruitt up with the Jets … How does that go back to Staley? I think Staley, and what they did with the Rams last year, was so college-like,” Alexander continued. “And the two-high system, well, Saban is known for that Cover 7, which is basically his split-field coverage stuff. So I think that they are, in a roundabout way, thinking, ‘If we can’t poach a guy from that (Rams or Bears) staff, who is the next best thing? Who can teach it?

“I think that is indicative of the growth of that system.”

And McVay, perhaps most notably of all the changes inevitably coming to his offense after a year spent battling against and collaborating with Staley (and witnessing possibly the ideal blueprint against that defense courtesy of LaFleur, Aaron Rodgers and the Green Bay Packers in the divisional round), led the push this offseason to trade for Stafford, a quarterback who is praised for his ability to process and problem-solve post-snap and for working through even “muddy” situations with his eyes, feet and arm angles.

However these separate systems continue to expand across the NFL in the coming years, however they blend with other concepts on other staffs, however the Rams fare this season, or the Chargers, or any number of coaches who are themselves pollinations off of either the offensive or the defensive system, McVay’s hiring of Staley, and their work with and against each other in those weeks of camp may one day be considered as an important note.

At the very least, it felt like a truly biological moment when the juxtaposing systems clashed with each other, challenged each other to outsmart each other, failed and fiddled with their respective plans and battled again and changed a little bit or a lot each time. They broke each other, as they helped build each other.

“I don’t know if it was completely intentional,” said Evero, “but I do feel like part of the newness of what was happening with our new scheme, some of the challenges presented to the offense and some of the learning challenges presented to the defense, I think that blend of all of those different factors happening at the same time kind of helped us (and) created that environment.”

Each system — McVay’s, and Staley’s — needed to learn and study components of each another to evolve — perhaps, in their minds, to stay a step ahead of what so many others across the league are working to replicate right now. Instead of doing it one or two games per season against an outside opponent, they did it every day.

“I think what was significant about how it unfolded was that Sean was really a huge part in the planning process,” Staley said. “He allowed our defense to get off the ground, made sure that we had rules of engagement and intentionally installed this where both sides were benefitting.

“It (was) year four of his offense, but (he made) sure that he wasn’t going too fast, too soon, where our defense would kind of be a sacrificial lamb. … We helped them, they helped us. A lot of the things that he had trouble with, they were able to see every day in practice and work on and have a plan for … It was super competitive, but in all of the right ways.”

There are only a few who were witnesses to especially those first few weeks, when “best met best” for the first time, but it seems they appreciate it for what it was, and wonder what it might become.

“(That defense) was so different from anything we’d seen before,” Kupp said, “that it forced us to think differently, and to grow.

“We got the opportunity to (go against) what I think is one of the best defensive schemes in the NFL — I think it really is, and I think you’re going to see it a lot more. I’m very excited for the first offense that cracks it.”

“I do think that the NFL is a copycat league,” Wolford said. “Everyone in this league will look at the best offenses — like Green Bay, last year, and I’m sure a lot of stuff will be pulled from Green Bay. And they’ll look at the best defenses, and a lot of stuff will be pulled from the Rams.

“And then more and more teams hire those coaches and adopt and run those schemes. What was it, eight years ago, everybody wanted to run Seattle’s defense? That trend may cycle out, or have a new ebb and flow. There are ebbs and flows with all of these trends.”