Also heavily edite-so people will got he Athletic and read it

‘It can’t be ego-driven’: How Raheem Morris hopes to take over the Rams’ defense, make an impact along the way

Jourdan Rodrigue Sep 6, 2021 41


The Rams will employ largely the same system they ran in 2020 under then-coordinator Brandon Staley. The complex “coverage-dictates-front”, stop-the-pass-first, two-high shell, post-snap-rotation scheme became the dominant defense in the league over the course of the season, ranking No. 1 in total defense, No. 1 against explosive passing plays, passing yards, yards allowed per pass attempt and touchdowns and No. 3 against the run.

McVay, who pushed hard to hire Morris at the conclusion of the Rams’ 2020 season after Staley departed to become the head coach of the Chargers, expects the defensive coordinator to pull at some threads and add his own wrinkles here and there, even as the core of it remains the same.

“There are different ways that we will still kind of keep foundational principles (same as) last year, but Raheem has got his imprint on this and then you always evolve,” McVay said. “We’re not naïve to the fact that everybody is studying what we did defensively because of the success that our guys had last year …

“You see Vic Fangio … Brandon learned from him and put his own spin on some things, and now Raheem will really be able to do the same things.”

But he has never run Staley’s system, which (to describe it overly simply) itself is a hybridization of former Bears defensive coordinator Fangio’s front principles, some of Alabama coach Nick Saban’s secondary principles, with a few twists Staley ran at Division III John Carroll thrown in for good measure.

Some offensive coordinators across the league have, half-jokingly, said that playing the Rams’ defense last season was like death by “10,000 papercuts.” In 2020, the defense presented nearly a league-high (up there with Fangio) number of light boxes that would invite the run, to which the Rams counter with gap-and-a-half design to great effect (they only allowed 3.8 yards per rushing attempt; they also allowed a 38 percent positive play rate when utilizing a light box, according to Sharp Football). If the run is stifled effectively, the quarterback, of course, will pass — and perhaps will do so in more adverse down/distances, because of the rate of run-stop. But a greater emphasis on two-high shells that rotate post-snap clouds the quarterback’s perception of the actual coverage, and safeties that play down to the ball and don’t overcommit help contain explosive passing plays and strain play-action passing when working in tandem with the rotations. Often, offenses were forced to dink and dunk on short run and pass plays to break ground against the 2020 Rams (who finished the year 25th in pass attempts-against of 20-plus yards).

The defensive coordinator who runs this specific system must have the patience to stick to the plan, get his players to commit fully to it, and bet that the opposing offensive coordinator — who, by the nature of the job, does want to “attack” and not dink and dunk the ball downfield three yards at a time — will lack the same patience and overshoot their own plan in some way to the benefit of the defense. For the Rams, time and again last season, that worked.

Morris and McVay agreed when he took the Rams’ job that he wasn’t going to change what already was working, even though that meant learning and coaching a system that wasn’t “his”.

“It can’t be ego-driven. It has to be built on listening, it has to be built on what the guys can do, and you going out and getting the best out of those guys,” Morris said when speaking with The Athletic in late August.

“When you come in these situations and you have a team that is playing really well at a high level, obviously you can add some wrinkles. But why mess with their base and their core beliefs and what they call it? Why make 65 people learn something brand-new when you can learn something brand-new and adapt to them?”