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Great read from Breer in todays MMQB. Staley knows how he wants to coach the team. He has ideas. This tells me he has a clue who he also wants to draft
from the article (I don't think thats a picture of Brandon Staley though)
.........................
Chargers coach Brandon Staley came prepared with material for Thursday’s meeting with his loosely organized leadership council—still just three months into the job, the new boss picked about 16 guys based on either their NFL experience or standing on the roster—and the team’s biggest-ticket acquisition of 2021 thus far quickly wound up on the receiving end of it.
Corey Linsley, fresh off seven seasons as a Packer, wasn’t actually on Jeopardy! himself last week. But he might as well have been when his old quarterback, Aaron Rodgers, called him out as the one teammate of his that he’d want to compete with on the game show.
“You’re famous this week!” Staley said on the Zoom.
From there, Staley gave veteran defensive tackle Linval Joseph crap about wearing a Chargers shirt into the meeting, saying he brought his apple for the teacher. And at one point, Derwin James mentioned working out with draft prospects nearby in Southern California, and the conversation turned to the star safety’s own assessments on players his team might be looking to add in a few weeks.
Kirby Lee/USA TODAY Sports; Winslow Townson/USA TODAY Sports; Jim Dedmon/USA TODAY Sports
“It was just normal ball conversation between players and coaches,” Staley told me Friday, driving north from his office in Orange County up to where his family’s still living, near Thousand Oaks (they’ll move down full-time in May). “It felt good. My takeaway is I felt like a real head coach for the first time. I told them that. I was like, ‘Guys, this is what I’ve dreamt about my whole life, to have this first meeting in front of you guys.’
In-depth analysis, unrivaled access. Get SPORTS ILLUSTRATED's best stories every weekday. Sign up now.
“On draft day, when people walk across the stage, or they’re at their house, there’s so much emotion. People, they love the NFL draft, because you’re seeing dreams come true right before your eyes. Yesterday was that kind of dream come true for me.”
Of course, Staley never imagined it would happen this way, through a laptop from a head coach’s office sitting in a building that still has all the markings of the league’s year under COVID-19 protocols.
But this is where he is, and where everyone is with offseason programs in mid-April 2021. Those were supposed to start Monday, April 5 for new coaches. Then, the date was moved to April 12. Then, it got moved again to the 19th, which all along had been slated to be the day that teams with returning head coaches could start. So even if things go according to plan, and offseason programs do start next week, the head start new coaches get will be gone.
For now, Staley seems O.K. with that. He and his staff haven’t had any lack of things to do, and that first leadership council meeting, to him, was proof that the Chargers’ new coaches have made progress in one area that’s pretty important to him.
That “normal ball conversation” Staley referenced? It doesn’t happen unless you’ve at least gotten to know the guys a little.
We’re now 17 days from the 2021 NFL draft, but the draft is just one area we’re hitting on in this week’s MMQB. Inside the column, you’ll get …
• A deep look at the Sam Darnold trade, from Carolina’s perspective.
• A rundown on rule changes proposals and when you can expect voting on those.
• The two teams that are signed up for Justin Fields’s second pro day.
• How the second pro days for Fields and Trey Lance will be different.
• Fifth-year options!
… And a whole lot more. But we’re starting with offseason programs, and how a new coach is supposed to plan one in 2021.
Part of the dream, for any coach worth his whistle, of finally reaching the mountaintop and becoming a head coach is getting to address the players for the first time. And, yup, that was part of what was so cool about Thursday for Staley. But more so than just that, after saying a few words about the weeks to come, the 38-year-old, whose rise was admittedly meteoric, wanted to use the time he got with the leaders on his team to listen.
“I wanted their feedback, because in the Zoom world, what’s really vital, how you organize your meetings is a really important component to your success, and I know it because I had to install a brand new defense last year over the computer,” Staley said. “So I wanted to get everyone’s feedback, because I know how I did it last year, but I wanted to hear it from the players. Because they’re the ones who matter, their feedback’s what matters to me.”
And for the players to be honest and open, like he wanted them to be, there had to be a rapport there, the kind that showed up in the aforementioned tone of the conversation.
So there is, indeed, a box already checked.
One of the first things Staley did after his January hiring was make sure, through FaceTime, phone calls and text messages, to start relationship building with his players—while encouraging his new assistants, as they came aboard, to do the same. Some, he’s since gotten to meet in person, from high-end adds like Linsley (who came in to get his physical and sign his deal in March) to guys fighting for a role like Joe Reed (he met Reed after a workout this week).
“That part was awesome,” Staley said. “You get them right away, and everything’s moving pretty fast, but even if it’s just a two-, three-minute conversation, that can go a long way.”
Maybe that seems a little over the top, that a short text exchange could be that meaningful, but it really is central to how Staley’s approaching the first phase of building a team, under circumstances that are, even a year into the pandemic, pretty unusual.
Really, this for Staley is about showing the players that he and his coaches will be as invested in them as they’ll ask the players to be in the team—which is a more specific way of getting to the idea of buy-in. And his experience with one individual player last year 100% colored that approach for the coach, at a time when we were all still learning to work around COVID-19 and most of us were like kindergartners learning to use Zoom.
Rams star Jalen Ramsey was the first person whom Staley had a Zoom meeting with, after everything in Southern California got shut down. Staley’s says his wife Amy, who saw the stress, can confirm that getting it right seemed like the most important thing in the world at the time to then new defensive coordinator of L.A.’s other team. So he prepared, and prepared, and prepared, and by time he was done had a reel of plays from Florida State, the Jaguars and Ramsey’s first half-season with the Rams.
“Ninety plays,” Staley said. “Bump and run. Off man. Tackling. Effort. Playing in the slot. Going all the way back, and then giving him a vision for how he was going to play for us. And there was a lot of good things. There were some things where, Man, I know we can improve these, and we need to. And then, Hey, here’s where I see you fitting in for us moving forward. … I knew a lot of his college coaches and stuff, so I had a little bit of a head start with him. But I’m like, Man, I gotta nail this moment.”
And soon, as the conversation went through what Ramsey had done in the past, and what Staley would want to do with him in the future, the defensive coordinator went from teacher to pupil.
“I learned a lot about him,” Staley said. “I learned that he loves to be coached. I love how intense he is about his game, how aware he is about his game. He’s not a defensive guy, he’s just a ball guy. I learned in that meeting that he wanted to play, and move around, and I felt he could—I studied his game a little bit from Florida State, and saw him do it, playing star, money, corner. I knew he could do everything. And that’s how I saw him, as a matchup guy that we could utilize to our advantage.
“But I learned in that conversation that he wanted to do that. Like, he wants to do that and showcase himself that way. It was an awesome conversation. I think more than anything it showed, Hey, my coach has really been looking at my game, and he’s got a plan for me.”
With the investment then going both ways—Staley’s investing in making Ramsey his very best and, in turn, Ramsey’s giving Staley full buy-in—the results were obvious. The Rams had the best defense in football and Ramsey was one of the best players in football.
But on top of all the football memories from that talk, Staley also remembers having their conversation interrupted by his three sons coming into the room, and at one point Amy popped in too, all of which allowed for everyone to let their guard down a little bit and for the relationship building process to become easy. Which, in turn, facilitated the comfort level each guy had with the other when the discussion turned back to work.
“I will remember it always, because Jalen is a big reason why I got this opportunity,” Staley said. “I mean, he’s one of the biggest reasons. He means so much to me. I remember that experience really shaping me. So when I came here to the Chargers, talking to my coaches, I shared that with them, because if this is the way it’s gotta be, we need to do this with our guys. We need to. We must. It’s incumbent upon us to do this.
“And that’s what we’ve been doing.”
Kirby Lee/USA Today Sports
As the spring of 2020 wore on, Staley wound up settling into a comfortable routine, moving his office out to the casita adjacent to his family’s rented house north of L.A. and working out of his mom’s old rocking chair. But the intensity never let up.
0:34/0:50
“At the end of it, I was exhausted,” Staley said. “I gave that thing everything I had—ask my wife, she saw me yelling into a computer screen. … I thought it was kind of an amazing way to go through it.”
Faced with this year’s challenges, it’s also giving Staley a roadmap. We’ll get more into the ins-and-outs of this in the takeaways section below, but there’s still, a week away from the supposed start of offseason programs, a fairly wide range of potential outcomes on the horizon. The league could start Phase I next week and go forward with a COVID-adjusted business-as-usual plan. Or the offseason could be all virtual again.
For Staley, the good news is there’s less flying blind now than there was a year ago when he was cutting up all that tape and trying to incorporate it into the Zoom for Ramsey.
Ways to continue relationship building are, to be sure, the most important thing Staley’s taking with him from 2020. But it is by no means the only thing he learned that he plans to apply over the next two months, no matter what shape or form the offseason program takes.
Staley plans to emphasize consistent communication. Last year, working with a staff of defensive position coaches he didn’t know, he learned, again, the importance of everyone’s getting the same message.
“It was tying in two levels of communication to make sure we were connected, in terms of coaching these players,” he said. “To me, you get one shot with these guys. And if these players see you’re on two different pages, that’s not a good thing. It was paramount to get that right. So we met a lot in the morning as coaches before we actually Zoomed with the players, so we would be connected on what we were teaching. …
“And then when we got with our players, we still had time parameters, so we tried to make our lessons for the day, our teaching lessons, as specific and purposeful as possible.”
And that flows right into Staley’s plan to tailor the teaching to the players. Because in the early part of America’s Zoom era it was hard (really, for any of us) to know how much the person on the other end was retaining, Staley made a point of following back up with guys after teaching them something.
“I felt like what was a really winning edge—FaceTime, follow up with John Johnson, follow up with Ramsey, follow up with Micah Kiser and make sure that they got it,” Staley said. “Like, Hey, do you really have it?”
A few months later, at the outset of camp, the benefits of that style of teaching were obvious.
“When we got to training camp, I knew we had done it right because right away we were up and running,” Staley said. “That’s when I knew we were gonna have a chance, I think Sean [McVay] would tell you the same thing. Defensively, we were up and running right away. And that’s a credit to our coaching staff with the Rams. All those defensive coaches are superstars.”
And while it did take round-the-clock work from Staley to get there, how McVay managed the players gave him another lesson to take with him—that, for those guys, more hours doesn’t always equal more production. Hearing that from McVay himself, a guy known for his maniacal work ethic, did surprise Staley a little. But it didn’t take long for him to see what his boss was thinking.
“We only went three days a week,” Staley said. “We did not want to wear those guys out, because we were at the beginning of that world. I think now it’s a little bit different. But I thought something we did well, we didn’t wear them out, where it’s overkill.”
The approach worked to the point where the mandated ramp-up coming out of the COVID-19 offseason, and going into training camp wasn’t just tolerated, it was embraced by the Rams’ coaches and, now regardless of whether it’s required or not, will likely be replicated by the Chargers—which is yet another sign that Staley’s focus is on making things right for the players first and foremost.
“What we learned that hopefully can be a positive is you don’t need to go 11-on-11, full speed, competitive to get something out of something,” Staley said. “What we learned in the acclimation period and ramp-up: You can get a lot accomplished without risking injury. It did take some time when we first got together, not very much, but I think had we been able to do some of that in the springtime—I’m talking about a ramp-up, acclimation type atmosphere—if we can do that, I think it’ll help the overall product.
“Because guys aren’t getting hurt, because you’re not going live, you’re just walking through, that’s something that could help.”
The other thing Staley recalls from last spring was how McVay had the staff “quality control” the offseason program at the end of it, first by side of the ball and then as a team, to try and see what they could take from it going forward that worked better than what they were doing in normal times. The idea then was probably that we’d be back to normal by now.
And obviously, we aren’t there yet.
So in one way, Staley’s notes from that time serve to frame what he’d want to do in any year from here on out. In another, they’re perfect to help him manage the continued uncertainty that the pandemic has created for 2021. Roll those two things into one, and that’s where Staley is as he works to creatively put together where the Chargers are headed next.
One idea already in the works is to create what he’s calling “The Situation Room” on Zoom, where the focus will be on situational football and high-level scheme discussion (“Where we’re bringing Chargers football alive together,” he said). The idea will be for everyone to learn together. Another is to have a speaker series, with people from football, sports in general, politics, business and religion coming on to address the players.
Then, there’s the idea that everyone needs to look inward too. To that end, Staley says now that most of the people he’s leaning on to adjust to being a head coach are the guys on his staff (coordinators Joe Lombardi, Renaldo Hill and Derius Swinton top the list), as opposed to his reaching outside the organization. And he’s also planning to have support staff from sports performance, strength and conditioning, mental health, athletic training, nutrition and P.R. address the players, to try and tie the guys in the locker room to the rest of the building.
“You’ve got all these people, our guys really have to meet them,” Staley said. “And in a virtual world, it really gets you farther from people. So that’s something I’m definitely going to do, so we can get that family atmosphere, that personal atmosphere.”
In turn, Staley believes the players will learn how many people are pulling in the direction of trying to get all those guys (90 now, 53 during the season) playing at the highest level they can—and that’s all the way down, from a coach assembling cutups like Staley did for Ramsey to someone working in the kitchen explaining the resources a player has there.
And that brings us right back to where we started: on that Thursday Zoom call, composed of 16 players, Staley, his coordinators, director of player engagement Arthur Hightower, team clinician Dr. Herb Martin, director of sports performance Anthony Lomando and strength coach Jonathan Brooks.
There, Staley got affirmation that the relationship building he’s looking for is coming along. The goal from here is for it to happen everywhere in that building—even if COVID-19 keeps everyone physically apart for a little while longer.
“It’s a big-time partnership,” said Staley. “And I’m gonna listen a lot. I’m gonna listen, I’m gonna learn about them as we’re going through this. [The work with Ramsey] was an example of that. And that’s what [Thursday] was about too, with our guys here.”
So as complicated as the pandemic has made all of this, what Staley’s trying to achieve at this point is remarkably simple. And you can count on this: It won’t change whenever the world does again.
from the article (I don't think thats a picture of Brandon Staley though)
.........................
Chargers coach Brandon Staley came prepared with material for Thursday’s meeting with his loosely organized leadership council—still just three months into the job, the new boss picked about 16 guys based on either their NFL experience or standing on the roster—and the team’s biggest-ticket acquisition of 2021 thus far quickly wound up on the receiving end of it.
Corey Linsley, fresh off seven seasons as a Packer, wasn’t actually on Jeopardy! himself last week. But he might as well have been when his old quarterback, Aaron Rodgers, called him out as the one teammate of his that he’d want to compete with on the game show.
“You’re famous this week!” Staley said on the Zoom.
From there, Staley gave veteran defensive tackle Linval Joseph crap about wearing a Chargers shirt into the meeting, saying he brought his apple for the teacher. And at one point, Derwin James mentioned working out with draft prospects nearby in Southern California, and the conversation turned to the star safety’s own assessments on players his team might be looking to add in a few weeks.
Kirby Lee/USA TODAY Sports; Winslow Townson/USA TODAY Sports; Jim Dedmon/USA TODAY Sports
“It was just normal ball conversation between players and coaches,” Staley told me Friday, driving north from his office in Orange County up to where his family’s still living, near Thousand Oaks (they’ll move down full-time in May). “It felt good. My takeaway is I felt like a real head coach for the first time. I told them that. I was like, ‘Guys, this is what I’ve dreamt about my whole life, to have this first meeting in front of you guys.’
In-depth analysis, unrivaled access. Get SPORTS ILLUSTRATED's best stories every weekday. Sign up now.
“On draft day, when people walk across the stage, or they’re at their house, there’s so much emotion. People, they love the NFL draft, because you’re seeing dreams come true right before your eyes. Yesterday was that kind of dream come true for me.”
Of course, Staley never imagined it would happen this way, through a laptop from a head coach’s office sitting in a building that still has all the markings of the league’s year under COVID-19 protocols.
But this is where he is, and where everyone is with offseason programs in mid-April 2021. Those were supposed to start Monday, April 5 for new coaches. Then, the date was moved to April 12. Then, it got moved again to the 19th, which all along had been slated to be the day that teams with returning head coaches could start. So even if things go according to plan, and offseason programs do start next week, the head start new coaches get will be gone.
For now, Staley seems O.K. with that. He and his staff haven’t had any lack of things to do, and that first leadership council meeting, to him, was proof that the Chargers’ new coaches have made progress in one area that’s pretty important to him.
That “normal ball conversation” Staley referenced? It doesn’t happen unless you’ve at least gotten to know the guys a little.
We’re now 17 days from the 2021 NFL draft, but the draft is just one area we’re hitting on in this week’s MMQB. Inside the column, you’ll get …
• A deep look at the Sam Darnold trade, from Carolina’s perspective.
• A rundown on rule changes proposals and when you can expect voting on those.
• The two teams that are signed up for Justin Fields’s second pro day.
• How the second pro days for Fields and Trey Lance will be different.
• Fifth-year options!
… And a whole lot more. But we’re starting with offseason programs, and how a new coach is supposed to plan one in 2021.
Part of the dream, for any coach worth his whistle, of finally reaching the mountaintop and becoming a head coach is getting to address the players for the first time. And, yup, that was part of what was so cool about Thursday for Staley. But more so than just that, after saying a few words about the weeks to come, the 38-year-old, whose rise was admittedly meteoric, wanted to use the time he got with the leaders on his team to listen.
“I wanted their feedback, because in the Zoom world, what’s really vital, how you organize your meetings is a really important component to your success, and I know it because I had to install a brand new defense last year over the computer,” Staley said. “So I wanted to get everyone’s feedback, because I know how I did it last year, but I wanted to hear it from the players. Because they’re the ones who matter, their feedback’s what matters to me.”
And for the players to be honest and open, like he wanted them to be, there had to be a rapport there, the kind that showed up in the aforementioned tone of the conversation.
So there is, indeed, a box already checked.
One of the first things Staley did after his January hiring was make sure, through FaceTime, phone calls and text messages, to start relationship building with his players—while encouraging his new assistants, as they came aboard, to do the same. Some, he’s since gotten to meet in person, from high-end adds like Linsley (who came in to get his physical and sign his deal in March) to guys fighting for a role like Joe Reed (he met Reed after a workout this week).
“That part was awesome,” Staley said. “You get them right away, and everything’s moving pretty fast, but even if it’s just a two-, three-minute conversation, that can go a long way.”
Maybe that seems a little over the top, that a short text exchange could be that meaningful, but it really is central to how Staley’s approaching the first phase of building a team, under circumstances that are, even a year into the pandemic, pretty unusual.
Really, this for Staley is about showing the players that he and his coaches will be as invested in them as they’ll ask the players to be in the team—which is a more specific way of getting to the idea of buy-in. And his experience with one individual player last year 100% colored that approach for the coach, at a time when we were all still learning to work around COVID-19 and most of us were like kindergartners learning to use Zoom.
Rams star Jalen Ramsey was the first person whom Staley had a Zoom meeting with, after everything in Southern California got shut down. Staley’s says his wife Amy, who saw the stress, can confirm that getting it right seemed like the most important thing in the world at the time to then new defensive coordinator of L.A.’s other team. So he prepared, and prepared, and prepared, and by time he was done had a reel of plays from Florida State, the Jaguars and Ramsey’s first half-season with the Rams.
“Ninety plays,” Staley said. “Bump and run. Off man. Tackling. Effort. Playing in the slot. Going all the way back, and then giving him a vision for how he was going to play for us. And there was a lot of good things. There were some things where, Man, I know we can improve these, and we need to. And then, Hey, here’s where I see you fitting in for us moving forward. … I knew a lot of his college coaches and stuff, so I had a little bit of a head start with him. But I’m like, Man, I gotta nail this moment.”
And soon, as the conversation went through what Ramsey had done in the past, and what Staley would want to do with him in the future, the defensive coordinator went from teacher to pupil.
“I learned a lot about him,” Staley said. “I learned that he loves to be coached. I love how intense he is about his game, how aware he is about his game. He’s not a defensive guy, he’s just a ball guy. I learned in that meeting that he wanted to play, and move around, and I felt he could—I studied his game a little bit from Florida State, and saw him do it, playing star, money, corner. I knew he could do everything. And that’s how I saw him, as a matchup guy that we could utilize to our advantage.
“But I learned in that conversation that he wanted to do that. Like, he wants to do that and showcase himself that way. It was an awesome conversation. I think more than anything it showed, Hey, my coach has really been looking at my game, and he’s got a plan for me.”
With the investment then going both ways—Staley’s investing in making Ramsey his very best and, in turn, Ramsey’s giving Staley full buy-in—the results were obvious. The Rams had the best defense in football and Ramsey was one of the best players in football.
But on top of all the football memories from that talk, Staley also remembers having their conversation interrupted by his three sons coming into the room, and at one point Amy popped in too, all of which allowed for everyone to let their guard down a little bit and for the relationship building process to become easy. Which, in turn, facilitated the comfort level each guy had with the other when the discussion turned back to work.
“I will remember it always, because Jalen is a big reason why I got this opportunity,” Staley said. “I mean, he’s one of the biggest reasons. He means so much to me. I remember that experience really shaping me. So when I came here to the Chargers, talking to my coaches, I shared that with them, because if this is the way it’s gotta be, we need to do this with our guys. We need to. We must. It’s incumbent upon us to do this.
“And that’s what we’ve been doing.”
Kirby Lee/USA Today Sports
As the spring of 2020 wore on, Staley wound up settling into a comfortable routine, moving his office out to the casita adjacent to his family’s rented house north of L.A. and working out of his mom’s old rocking chair. But the intensity never let up.
0:34/0:50
“At the end of it, I was exhausted,” Staley said. “I gave that thing everything I had—ask my wife, she saw me yelling into a computer screen. … I thought it was kind of an amazing way to go through it.”
Faced with this year’s challenges, it’s also giving Staley a roadmap. We’ll get more into the ins-and-outs of this in the takeaways section below, but there’s still, a week away from the supposed start of offseason programs, a fairly wide range of potential outcomes on the horizon. The league could start Phase I next week and go forward with a COVID-adjusted business-as-usual plan. Or the offseason could be all virtual again.
For Staley, the good news is there’s less flying blind now than there was a year ago when he was cutting up all that tape and trying to incorporate it into the Zoom for Ramsey.
Ways to continue relationship building are, to be sure, the most important thing Staley’s taking with him from 2020. But it is by no means the only thing he learned that he plans to apply over the next two months, no matter what shape or form the offseason program takes.
Staley plans to emphasize consistent communication. Last year, working with a staff of defensive position coaches he didn’t know, he learned, again, the importance of everyone’s getting the same message.
“It was tying in two levels of communication to make sure we were connected, in terms of coaching these players,” he said. “To me, you get one shot with these guys. And if these players see you’re on two different pages, that’s not a good thing. It was paramount to get that right. So we met a lot in the morning as coaches before we actually Zoomed with the players, so we would be connected on what we were teaching. …
“And then when we got with our players, we still had time parameters, so we tried to make our lessons for the day, our teaching lessons, as specific and purposeful as possible.”
And that flows right into Staley’s plan to tailor the teaching to the players. Because in the early part of America’s Zoom era it was hard (really, for any of us) to know how much the person on the other end was retaining, Staley made a point of following back up with guys after teaching them something.
“I felt like what was a really winning edge—FaceTime, follow up with John Johnson, follow up with Ramsey, follow up with Micah Kiser and make sure that they got it,” Staley said. “Like, Hey, do you really have it?”
A few months later, at the outset of camp, the benefits of that style of teaching were obvious.
“When we got to training camp, I knew we had done it right because right away we were up and running,” Staley said. “That’s when I knew we were gonna have a chance, I think Sean [McVay] would tell you the same thing. Defensively, we were up and running right away. And that’s a credit to our coaching staff with the Rams. All those defensive coaches are superstars.”
And while it did take round-the-clock work from Staley to get there, how McVay managed the players gave him another lesson to take with him—that, for those guys, more hours doesn’t always equal more production. Hearing that from McVay himself, a guy known for his maniacal work ethic, did surprise Staley a little. But it didn’t take long for him to see what his boss was thinking.
“We only went three days a week,” Staley said. “We did not want to wear those guys out, because we were at the beginning of that world. I think now it’s a little bit different. But I thought something we did well, we didn’t wear them out, where it’s overkill.”
The approach worked to the point where the mandated ramp-up coming out of the COVID-19 offseason, and going into training camp wasn’t just tolerated, it was embraced by the Rams’ coaches and, now regardless of whether it’s required or not, will likely be replicated by the Chargers—which is yet another sign that Staley’s focus is on making things right for the players first and foremost.
“What we learned that hopefully can be a positive is you don’t need to go 11-on-11, full speed, competitive to get something out of something,” Staley said. “What we learned in the acclimation period and ramp-up: You can get a lot accomplished without risking injury. It did take some time when we first got together, not very much, but I think had we been able to do some of that in the springtime—I’m talking about a ramp-up, acclimation type atmosphere—if we can do that, I think it’ll help the overall product.
“Because guys aren’t getting hurt, because you’re not going live, you’re just walking through, that’s something that could help.”
The other thing Staley recalls from last spring was how McVay had the staff “quality control” the offseason program at the end of it, first by side of the ball and then as a team, to try and see what they could take from it going forward that worked better than what they were doing in normal times. The idea then was probably that we’d be back to normal by now.
And obviously, we aren’t there yet.
So in one way, Staley’s notes from that time serve to frame what he’d want to do in any year from here on out. In another, they’re perfect to help him manage the continued uncertainty that the pandemic has created for 2021. Roll those two things into one, and that’s where Staley is as he works to creatively put together where the Chargers are headed next.
One idea already in the works is to create what he’s calling “The Situation Room” on Zoom, where the focus will be on situational football and high-level scheme discussion (“Where we’re bringing Chargers football alive together,” he said). The idea will be for everyone to learn together. Another is to have a speaker series, with people from football, sports in general, politics, business and religion coming on to address the players.
Then, there’s the idea that everyone needs to look inward too. To that end, Staley says now that most of the people he’s leaning on to adjust to being a head coach are the guys on his staff (coordinators Joe Lombardi, Renaldo Hill and Derius Swinton top the list), as opposed to his reaching outside the organization. And he’s also planning to have support staff from sports performance, strength and conditioning, mental health, athletic training, nutrition and P.R. address the players, to try and tie the guys in the locker room to the rest of the building.
“You’ve got all these people, our guys really have to meet them,” Staley said. “And in a virtual world, it really gets you farther from people. So that’s something I’m definitely going to do, so we can get that family atmosphere, that personal atmosphere.”
In turn, Staley believes the players will learn how many people are pulling in the direction of trying to get all those guys (90 now, 53 during the season) playing at the highest level they can—and that’s all the way down, from a coach assembling cutups like Staley did for Ramsey to someone working in the kitchen explaining the resources a player has there.
And that brings us right back to where we started: on that Thursday Zoom call, composed of 16 players, Staley, his coordinators, director of player engagement Arthur Hightower, team clinician Dr. Herb Martin, director of sports performance Anthony Lomando and strength coach Jonathan Brooks.
There, Staley got affirmation that the relationship building he’s looking for is coming along. The goal from here is for it to happen everywhere in that building—even if COVID-19 keeps everyone physically apart for a little while longer.
“It’s a big-time partnership,” said Staley. “And I’m gonna listen a lot. I’m gonna listen, I’m gonna learn about them as we’re going through this. [The work with Ramsey] was an example of that. And that’s what [Thursday] was about too, with our guys here.”
So as complicated as the pandemic has made all of this, what Staley’s trying to achieve at this point is remarkably simple. And you can count on this: It won’t change whenever the world does again.
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