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Here’s the most recent article breaking it down. Mays is essentially writeing about ways offenses are trying to counter the Fangio defensive scheme. But it provides some good insights about what Staley is trying to do here defensively also.
Like most histories, the story of football comes in cycles. Through some accidental or desperation-fueled innovation, a particular scheme comes to prominence. Think Bill Walsh stumbling into the West Coast offense because his quarterback had a popcorn arm. As that system takes hold, opponents around the league start devising ways to beat it. Eventually, defensive fads like the Tampa 2 spread through the league, and the entire process starts anew.
“The beauty of our game is that everything comes in circles,” said Packers offensive coordinator Nathaniel Hackett. “ It’s about people adjusting in the offseason, watching tape, and learning how to attack it.”
Every generation, a new schematic empire rises and falls in the NFL. And as the 2021 season begins, it feels as though the age of the Vic Fangio-Brandon Staley defense has arrived.
Vic Fangio has coached in the NFL since 1986, and his status as a defensive mastermind — whether as the Bears’ coordinator from 2015-18 or currently as the Broncos’ head coach — is well established.But 38-year-old Brandon Staley’s first season as the Rams’ defensive coordinator last year was nothing short of a revelation. Despite a shortened, pandemic-riddled offseason, the first-time coordinator orchestrated the best scoring defense in football. A former Fangio disciple who served on both the Broncos’ and Bears’ staffs, Staley took foundational principles of those systems, molded them around stars Aaron Donald and Jalen Ramsey, and used a few tweaks to create a defense perfectly suited for the modern NFL.
Offensive coaches around the league have longed talked about Fangio like some sort of football boogeyman — a 60-something, schematic grim reaper in a crewneck sweatshirt. But in Staley, those ideas had a young, charismatic messenger who used them to elevate two of the biggest names in the sport. In the wake of Staley’s success, the levee has broken. Last year, only two teams — the Broncos and the Rams — aligned with two high safeties on close to 80 percent of their plays. Look at any chart conveying defensive structure league-wide, and those two teams were living in their own unique world. This season, that number could easily triple.
As the Chargers’ new head coach, Staley has moved his system about 80 miles down the 405. The Broncos and Rams will carry over the same ideas. Former Rams’ assistant Joe Berry is now the defensive coordinator in Green Bay. Sean Desai is a former Fangio assistant now running the defense in Chicago. The Lions’ new defensive staff has multiple coaches fluent in these ideas.
And that’s before even getting to the inevitable thievery that will happen among teams throughout the league. “After those types of seasons, all types of people call you,” Brownsdefensive coordinator Joe Woods said of Staley. “Whatever teams play well, in terms of top defenses, teams start copying certain aspects of what they do.”
There’s no way around it: The dawn of the two-high era among NFL defenses is here, and the league’s offensive coaches know it too. They’ve been in the lab all offseason, preparing for the latest trend to spread around the league. The answers they’ve found could come to define this NFL season.
“As you see offenses that are similar to our offense spread around the league, you have to assume that defenses are going to continue to evolve to take away what you do best,” said Browns head coach Kevin Stefanski. “And that’s where we then have to make a decision on what our counterpunch is.”
When Aaron Rodgers talks about the schematic arc of the NFL, he can sound downright wistful. This season will be Rodgers’ 14th as the Packers’ starter, and the reigning MVP has seen various systems of defense come and go.
“I think it goes back to a central theme in the league, and that’s that it’s very cyclical,” Rodgers said. “It’s very trendy.”
In the span of about 5 minutes, Rodgers guides an evocative tour of the league’s defensive evolution. Early in his career, the 3-4 defense had come back into vogue, echoing beliefs from the 1970s NFL. Then Tony Dungy and Lovie Smith helped usher in the Tampa 2 era, as coverage became king. As offenses spread out, defenses were forced to adapt. In the early 2010s, the Seahawks’ brand of Cover 3 started traveling around the league, with Pete Caroll lieutenants like Gus Bradley and Dan Quinn earning head coaching jobs and taking Seattle’s defensive identity with them.
“Some of those guys started branching out a little bit,” Rodgers said. “You started seeing more teams being able to attack those coverages because they’d seen it every day in practice. There had been conversations between coaches. And then they start figuring out what plays give those defenses the most problems.”
Like many offensive-minded people around the league, Rodgers believes that the ideas Staley — and Fangio before him — have brought will represent the next schematic craze. “I think in a pass-happy league, this is the natural progression for defenses,” Rodgers said. “To say, ‘Can you stick to the run game?’ Can you have patience in the run game?’”
To understand how offenses will respond to the inevitable Fangio-Staley clones, it’s important to know what’s made these concepts popular in the first place. As the Seahawks’ single-high, Cover-3 system became all the rage throughout the 2010s, the play-action elements of the Mike Shanahan-Gary Kubiak offense emerged as its natural foil. Staples like Kyle Shanahan’s Burner concept — which paired a vertical corner route with a deep crossing-route situated behind it — were well suited to take advantage of defenses committed to playing with one single high safety and the other rotated into the box. Savvy play-callers like Shanahan and Sean McVay were able to spam defenses with single-high beaters and watch as they reaped the benefits.
Fangio’s method of defense makes life difficult for opponents in several different ways. The first is with the way he attacks their protections with methods that have tormented coaches from the Shanahan-McVay tree. With simulated pressure looks and odd front structures, Fangio and Staley are able to manipulate protection rules and force offenses to keep a back in protection to limit a quarterback’s options.
“As we’ve seen offenses go away from the West Coast offense — which is all about timing, precision, rhythm, spacing — to more scheme-heavy offenses, where it’s a lot of placing guys in spots and letting the system work, quarterbacks are less able to understand protections because they’re just not trained,” Rodgers said.
Mind games upfront may be a subtle annoyance to folks on the inside, but it’s the approach on the back end where Staley has really gotten the world’s attention. The Fangio-Staley defensive system relies on a shell of two high safeties as the foundation of its coverage philosophy. That starting point has multiple benefits for the defense. Because both safeties are playing “from depth,” they’re able to catch all the deep crossing routes that gash defenses content to live in single high. Just as important, a two-high shell also makes defenses much harder to predict. By lining up this way, defenses are able to play any coverage on the menu, and the post-snap picture for quarterbacks starts to blur. Staley’s defense played plenty of Cover 3 last season, but the disguise would often hide the specifics of the coverage until it was too late.
“The two-high and what you run out of that is completely different,” said Lions passing game coordinator Aubrey Pleasant, who served as the Rams’ cornerbacks coach under Staley in 2020. “I just think with the game being spread out, the game being open, not being able to touch defenders, not being able to touch receivers the way you used to in the first five yards, we try to make it a little more cloudy for the quarterback and make him try to figure out post-snap.”
The central tenet of this defensive philosophy is to limit explosive plays, and Staley’s Rams accomplished that better than any defense in the NFL last season. In a league dominated by high-octane passing, this style of defense sends offenses back to the drawing board, forcing them to reevaluate how they want to shape their passing game.
“[Fangio] is one of the more frustrating coordinators to play, because you’re waiting and waiting for an explosive shot, and they don’t ever give them to you,” Bengals offensive coordinator Brian Callahan said. “If you’re a QB that likes to do that, it can be really frustrating. You almost have to change your mindset when you play against those guys.”
Their recent success has made Fangio and Staley the hot names in defensive football, but several other coaches have quietly implemented strategies with shared DNA to the Fangio-Staley model. For years, Jets head coach and former 49ers defensive coordinator Robert Saleh was known as a Pete Carroll disciple who espoused the same single-high philosophy that Carroll implemented in Seattle. But over the past few seasons, Saleh and the coaches who’ve worked with him have taken an illuminating turn.
According to TruMedia, the 49ers ran Quarters (Cover-4) on 213 of their first- and second-down snaps. That ranked second in the NFL, behind only the Rams (218). The Browns, coordinated by former Niners’ secondary coach Joe Woods, ranked third. It’s no coincidence that the coaches who’ve had a front-row seat to the particulars of the league’s most popular offensive system have all adopted a similar approach for how to stop it. Cleveland and San Francisco incorporate different front structures than the Rams, but on the back end, they’ve prioritized eliminating explosive passes over stopping the run on early downs.
“You may play a little more coverage against guys like that,” Woods said of the Shanahan tree. “You want to protect yourself against the explosives. When you’re playing split-safety, people may look at it like the defense is softer, you really have the potential to put nine guys in the box. It’s just that they’re coming from depth.”
Quarters coverage isn’t a new idea, but earlier iterations of it were more aggressive, with all four secondary players set in a straight line across the field and the safeties having to quickly trigger to stop the run. “We used to say birds on a wire,” Rodgers said. “So, four guys on the same depth, 8-10 yards, straight across.”
Green Bay used to deploy what Rodgers calls “read routes” to attack those looks, sending a receiver straight at the safety as if to block him before taking a route vertically. As one NFL play-caller put it, “Against typical Quarters, you’re throwing posts all day.”
The newer type of Quarters sweeping the league is far less daring. Rodgers says that it’s inspired by the “Palms” coverage that Fangio has long favored, which features two high safeties with no role in fitting the run. By removing their run responsibilities, both safeties can play with more depth and help negate throws down the field. Different coaches use different imagery when talking about this modified version of Quarters. Some call it an umbrella. Others refer to it as a “dome” look. Staley likes to say he’s putting a “roof” over the defense.
Whatever the terminology, the goal is the same: Force offenses to beat you without the benefit of 30- and 40-yard shot plays. And as that philosophy starts to proliferate around the league, offenses will have to rethink what they’ve been programmed to believe about how to score in the modern NFL. “I think there’s gonna be much less margin for error for the efficiency that’s necessary,” McVay said. “It’s much harder to hunt out those explosives. There’s a premium on offenses that are efficient and explosive.”
Soon after taking the job as the Packers’ defensive coordinator earlier this year, Joe Barry came face-to-face with the players responsible for his undoing. Barry was the linebackers coach for a Rams team that ultimately fell to the Packers at Lambeau Field in the divisional round of the 2021 playoffs. That afternoon, the Rams’ top-rated defense allowed the longest pass and run that it’d given up all season as Green Bay rolled to a 32-18 win. “Like I tell [Aaron Rodgers], ‘Thank God that I’m with you guys now,” Barry said.
No offense was able to exploit the Rams’ defensive strategy quite like the Packers did last season — and that’s because few units around the league are as disciplined as Green Bay’s. That calm and collected approach begins with Rodgers, who honed the ability to pick his spots during nearly a decade of games against Lovie Smith’s Bears.
“That’s always what I had to mentally wrap my head around playing the Bears for so many years: ‘It’s gonna be a checkdown game,’” Rodgers said. “It’s gonna be a dink-and-dunk game — until they come out of their scheme.’”
In 2007, when Rodgers was backing up Brett Favre, the Bears played 14 straight snaps of soft Tampa 2 coverage. “I’m just thinking, ‘Are you kidding me?” Rodgers said. “They’re not gonna do anything different? But that’s what this defense was predicated on.”
Unlike more antsy quarterbacks and play callers, the Packers are comfortable taking whatever gains a defense provides, no matter how modest. It leaves Rodgers and Co. well equipped to prod Staley’s defense for vulnerabilities in a way few others can. “They ran the football, and Aaron is the best quick-game thrower of all time,” Staley said of the playoff matchup with Green Bay. “He got into a rhythm. We put a roof over ‘em. It wasn’t like that was happening. But they were steady down the field.”
The Packers-Rams matchup from last year provides a basic blueprint for how teams might address the new wave of Staley-influenced defenses, and that plan starts with the mentality an offense brings into the game. The standoff between Staley and Matt LaFleur represents the broader staring contest that the former’s defense sets into motion. When describing the Packers’ success that afternoon, Staley uses the word “patience” four times. In structuring their defenses, Staley and Fangio are making a bet against the impulsive nature of their opponents. Their hope is that in the midst of an extended drive consisting of short gains, a play-caller or quarterback gets restless and seeks out the explosive gain they’ve been trained to hunt. “What happens is, most offensive coordinators, they can’t handle that,” Hackett said. They get bored … You can’t get bored with success. But you have to define what success is for you.”
Green Bay’s plan in the playoffs was to slowly and methodically chip away at the foundation of the Rams’ philosophy. In the same way that offenses might struggle taking short gains, it’s difficult for defenses to repeatedly give them up. Hackett says that against the Rams’ type of umbrella coverage, out- and in-breaking routes for short gains can be effective. On a second-and-8 the Packers’ opening drive, Rodgers hit Davante Adams on a quick out at the sticks that picked up an easy first down. By repeatedly making the Rams pay for providing that cushion, Rodgers was able to test the Rams’ resolve to keep allowing those short completions. Facing a first- and-10 with less than a minute in the second quarter, Rodgers called a double-move off the same route stem from Adams and hit him for a chunk play down the right sideline.
“We’re just trying to pull them up real slow, we’re trying to reel ‘em in a little bit,” Rodgers said as he casted an imaginary fishing rod. “I remember we talked that week about the importance of hitting the quick games to draw them up.”
The best example of Green Bay’s patience paying off came late in the fourth quarter, when Rodgers was able to hit Allen Lazard on a deep post off play action for a 58-yard touchdown that put the game away. To that point in the game, the Packers had been able to run the ball effectively and consistently, which Rodgers credits for setting up the game-sealing score. Set up as a Quarters safety to Lazard’s side, safety Jordan Fuller triggered on the run fake and was powerless as Lazard streaked down the middle of the field. In the broader staring contest that Staley’s defense sets up, the Rams blinked first.
“That’s the beauty of what we do,” Hackett said. “Everything is setting stuff up. Being patient, being patient, being efficient and just doing what your job is within your play. Our guys, not only are they talented players, but they’re so smart. They almost feel it happening. We paint this picture where it’s ”OK, slowly pick up yards, and all of a sudden, ‘Bam!’”
As teams around the NFL look to the Packers and other teams for solutions to the Staley problem, the answers they’re going to find are fairly…boring. There’s no silver bullet pass concept hidden in the depths of NFL playbooks, no exciting counterpunch to be found.
The plan starts with exploiting the light boxes that Staley and Fangio present with a dedication and ability to run the ball, an aspect of the game that Hackett believes has become something of a lost art.
“We watched it and were like, ‘We can’t do [play-action] passes,” Hackett said. “‘We can’t get explosive plays.’” We have to make them stop the run. Because we can run the ball every play on them.”
Green Bay’s trio of backs — Aaron Jones, Jamaal Williams, and A.J. Dillon — racked up 191 rushing yards against a Rams unit that had finished third in run-defense DVOA (and featured a hobbled version of Aaron Donald). “You could feel that physicality with those three runners,” Staley said. “I think that was a winning edge for them, just having three runners that are really talented, but they’re different. And they’re coming at you.”
To complement their running game, the Packers also have one of the NFL’s most effective RPO packages, which allows Rodgers to control the game in a way most quarterbacks can’t. The option to flip the ball out to Adams against unfavorable box counts gives Green Bay another outlet to pick up easy yardage against a team preventing explosive plays. For [Aaron], if we do call [those RPOs], that allows us to put people out on the perimeter and allow him to dictate,” Hackett said. “Now, all of a sudden, if you’re giving me this, I’m gonna let Davante Adams have the ball. If you’re not gonna challenge him, we’re gonna do it every single time. Just like if we handed the ball off and got six yards.”
Not every team has Aaron Rodgers and Davante Adams, but as Staley’s ideas travel, the importance of high-percentage completions and receivers who can create after the catch is only going to increase. The 49ers, who also had relative success against Staley last season, have been building their passing game around this idea for years. As the Niners defense transitioned to more dome Quarters coverage, its offense assembled a collection of playmaking receivers and devised the most efficient yards-after-catch offense in the entire NFL. In a league where more teams are trying to erase deep completions, it’s never been more crucial for offenses to find ways to turn 7-yard glance routes into 25-yard gains. As one offensive coordinator put it, “If [defenses] are gonna make you earn it, you better have a guy who can play a make or two.”
If there is one area down the field that offenses feel like they can exploit, it’s the space outside the numbers. At the simplest level, Staley’s defense makes the game as difficult as possible on quarterbacks, which means it’s no surprise that the throws most available to the offense are the ones that are most difficult to make. When asked where offenses can win, multiple coaches brought up the need to have a top-flight quarterback-receiver duo that can exploit the de-facto one-on-one matchups on the outside against Quarters coverage.
“The reliance on being able to throw the ball outside the numbers [will grow,]” Callahan said. “Do you have a guy that can go out and win? Do you have a guy that can throw the ball intermediate, down the field, outside the numbers and still be efficient? Because what they’re trying to do is collapse the middle of the field and not allow you to have free reign wherever you want to throw the ball.”
It’s no coincidence that McVay, the offensive coach with a more intimate knowledge of Staley’s defense than any other in the NFL, made an all-in move this offseason for Matthew Stafford — a quarterback whose arm and attitude allows him to stretch defenses horizontally like few passers in the league can.
When discussing the lessons he’s learned watching Staley’s defense up close, McVay refrains from coughing up all the secrets that he’s had to earn over plenty of maddening practice sessions. But one hint he will reveal is that the days of dialing up pointed plays designed to go after specific coverages are coming to an end.
“You’ve got to be able to activate more all-purpose plays,” McVay said. “We might be calling something defensively, and based on whatever the play is, it might look like something else. It takes certain plays to really reveal and express exactly what we’re doing defensively.”
In the passing game, that means calling more multi-use plays that could potentially work against multiple coverages and leaning on concepts where receivers are forced to read and react to the coverage contours in real time. If that sounds difficult, that’s because it is.
“The disguise thing is hard because people that want to get the perfect play, they don’t know exactly what they’re getting,” Hackett said. “So you might have to have more call it-run it, which makes you simplify down again. You go to more all-purpose, which might not be an explosive all the time.”
Along with being unpredictable in coverage, the Rams also do an expert job of staying one step ahead with their fronts. Even as teams turn to the run game as a means of attacking Staley-influenced defenses, the various fronts and unconventional personnel packages that the Rams use also make finding chunk gains on the ground a challenge. Most of the league’s most potent run games do an expert job of creating angles with various motions to build in cutback lanes that turn 5-yard runs into 25-yard gashes. That’s harder to pull off when a defense is consistently lining up in ways that are nearly impossible to predict. “A lot of people are trained to say, ‘I’m taking this block to the Mike linebacker,’” Hackett said. “But then the linebacker’s not [in that spot]. He’s way over there … That defense was rare. It was something where we had to think to ourselves, ‘Let’s breathe.’ Let’s simplify it down. Let’s coach up the techniques and really take a step back to major basics.”
So, to recap here: the most effective ways to combat this defense include more running (which is inherently less efficient), more short completions (which require longer, mistake-free drives), and simpler play calls less capable of creating chunk gains. With answers like that, there’s a reason this system of defense is about to take the league by storm.
This offseason, as offensive coaches around the league worked on ways to answer his defense and others like it, Staley has been working on his own modifications. He knows that as more defensive systems start to resemble his own, he and the Chargers staff will have to work even harder to stay ahead of the curve. “I think that we have to look at how teams started to attack you later in the year when they have more inventory of your defense,” Staley said. “So you look at ‘What trended as the season went on? Were there common themes?’ I think that’s part of it. You’re always anticipating where the NFL’s going. You’re aware of how other offenses are playing and what’s working for people.”
Other offenses will undoubtedly try to poach ideas that the Packers used with success last January. The question is whether that cold day in Green Bay was an exception that other offenses will struggle to replicate. With a healthy Donald back in the lineup and most offenses lacking a quarterback with Rodgers’ profound discipline, can other teams apply what they’ve learned from the Packers’ blueprint?
Rodgers has seen plenty of trends come and go during his 17 years in the NFL. The next few years will prove if this one is built to last.
“That’s why these fads don’t last forever,” Rodgers said. “Eventually people catch up because you realize when you play against that every day what gives that the most trouble. Slowly — in a league that loves gossip — that stuff starts to filter out and around to the rest of the league.”
Like most histories, the story of football comes in cycles. Through some accidental or desperation-fueled innovation, a particular scheme comes to prominence. Think Bill Walsh stumbling into the West Coast offense because his quarterback had a popcorn arm. As that system takes hold, opponents around the league start devising ways to beat it. Eventually, defensive fads like the Tampa 2 spread through the league, and the entire process starts anew.
“The beauty of our game is that everything comes in circles,” said Packers offensive coordinator Nathaniel Hackett. “ It’s about people adjusting in the offseason, watching tape, and learning how to attack it.”
Every generation, a new schematic empire rises and falls in the NFL. And as the 2021 season begins, it feels as though the age of the Vic Fangio-Brandon Staley defense has arrived.
Vic Fangio has coached in the NFL since 1986, and his status as a defensive mastermind — whether as the Bears’ coordinator from 2015-18 or currently as the Broncos’ head coach — is well established.But 38-year-old Brandon Staley’s first season as the Rams’ defensive coordinator last year was nothing short of a revelation. Despite a shortened, pandemic-riddled offseason, the first-time coordinator orchestrated the best scoring defense in football. A former Fangio disciple who served on both the Broncos’ and Bears’ staffs, Staley took foundational principles of those systems, molded them around stars Aaron Donald and Jalen Ramsey, and used a few tweaks to create a defense perfectly suited for the modern NFL.
Offensive coaches around the league have longed talked about Fangio like some sort of football boogeyman — a 60-something, schematic grim reaper in a crewneck sweatshirt. But in Staley, those ideas had a young, charismatic messenger who used them to elevate two of the biggest names in the sport. In the wake of Staley’s success, the levee has broken. Last year, only two teams — the Broncos and the Rams — aligned with two high safeties on close to 80 percent of their plays. Look at any chart conveying defensive structure league-wide, and those two teams were living in their own unique world. This season, that number could easily triple.
As the Chargers’ new head coach, Staley has moved his system about 80 miles down the 405. The Broncos and Rams will carry over the same ideas. Former Rams’ assistant Joe Berry is now the defensive coordinator in Green Bay. Sean Desai is a former Fangio assistant now running the defense in Chicago. The Lions’ new defensive staff has multiple coaches fluent in these ideas.
And that’s before even getting to the inevitable thievery that will happen among teams throughout the league. “After those types of seasons, all types of people call you,” Brownsdefensive coordinator Joe Woods said of Staley. “Whatever teams play well, in terms of top defenses, teams start copying certain aspects of what they do.”
There’s no way around it: The dawn of the two-high era among NFL defenses is here, and the league’s offensive coaches know it too. They’ve been in the lab all offseason, preparing for the latest trend to spread around the league. The answers they’ve found could come to define this NFL season.
“As you see offenses that are similar to our offense spread around the league, you have to assume that defenses are going to continue to evolve to take away what you do best,” said Browns head coach Kevin Stefanski. “And that’s where we then have to make a decision on what our counterpunch is.”
When Aaron Rodgers talks about the schematic arc of the NFL, he can sound downright wistful. This season will be Rodgers’ 14th as the Packers’ starter, and the reigning MVP has seen various systems of defense come and go.
“I think it goes back to a central theme in the league, and that’s that it’s very cyclical,” Rodgers said. “It’s very trendy.”
In the span of about 5 minutes, Rodgers guides an evocative tour of the league’s defensive evolution. Early in his career, the 3-4 defense had come back into vogue, echoing beliefs from the 1970s NFL. Then Tony Dungy and Lovie Smith helped usher in the Tampa 2 era, as coverage became king. As offenses spread out, defenses were forced to adapt. In the early 2010s, the Seahawks’ brand of Cover 3 started traveling around the league, with Pete Caroll lieutenants like Gus Bradley and Dan Quinn earning head coaching jobs and taking Seattle’s defensive identity with them.
“Some of those guys started branching out a little bit,” Rodgers said. “You started seeing more teams being able to attack those coverages because they’d seen it every day in practice. There had been conversations between coaches. And then they start figuring out what plays give those defenses the most problems.”
Like many offensive-minded people around the league, Rodgers believes that the ideas Staley — and Fangio before him — have brought will represent the next schematic craze. “I think in a pass-happy league, this is the natural progression for defenses,” Rodgers said. “To say, ‘Can you stick to the run game?’ Can you have patience in the run game?’”
To understand how offenses will respond to the inevitable Fangio-Staley clones, it’s important to know what’s made these concepts popular in the first place. As the Seahawks’ single-high, Cover-3 system became all the rage throughout the 2010s, the play-action elements of the Mike Shanahan-Gary Kubiak offense emerged as its natural foil. Staples like Kyle Shanahan’s Burner concept — which paired a vertical corner route with a deep crossing-route situated behind it — were well suited to take advantage of defenses committed to playing with one single high safety and the other rotated into the box. Savvy play-callers like Shanahan and Sean McVay were able to spam defenses with single-high beaters and watch as they reaped the benefits.
Fangio’s method of defense makes life difficult for opponents in several different ways. The first is with the way he attacks their protections with methods that have tormented coaches from the Shanahan-McVay tree. With simulated pressure looks and odd front structures, Fangio and Staley are able to manipulate protection rules and force offenses to keep a back in protection to limit a quarterback’s options.
“As we’ve seen offenses go away from the West Coast offense — which is all about timing, precision, rhythm, spacing — to more scheme-heavy offenses, where it’s a lot of placing guys in spots and letting the system work, quarterbacks are less able to understand protections because they’re just not trained,” Rodgers said.
Mind games upfront may be a subtle annoyance to folks on the inside, but it’s the approach on the back end where Staley has really gotten the world’s attention. The Fangio-Staley defensive system relies on a shell of two high safeties as the foundation of its coverage philosophy. That starting point has multiple benefits for the defense. Because both safeties are playing “from depth,” they’re able to catch all the deep crossing routes that gash defenses content to live in single high. Just as important, a two-high shell also makes defenses much harder to predict. By lining up this way, defenses are able to play any coverage on the menu, and the post-snap picture for quarterbacks starts to blur. Staley’s defense played plenty of Cover 3 last season, but the disguise would often hide the specifics of the coverage until it was too late.
“The two-high and what you run out of that is completely different,” said Lions passing game coordinator Aubrey Pleasant, who served as the Rams’ cornerbacks coach under Staley in 2020. “I just think with the game being spread out, the game being open, not being able to touch defenders, not being able to touch receivers the way you used to in the first five yards, we try to make it a little more cloudy for the quarterback and make him try to figure out post-snap.”
The central tenet of this defensive philosophy is to limit explosive plays, and Staley’s Rams accomplished that better than any defense in the NFL last season. In a league dominated by high-octane passing, this style of defense sends offenses back to the drawing board, forcing them to reevaluate how they want to shape their passing game.
“[Fangio] is one of the more frustrating coordinators to play, because you’re waiting and waiting for an explosive shot, and they don’t ever give them to you,” Bengals offensive coordinator Brian Callahan said. “If you’re a QB that likes to do that, it can be really frustrating. You almost have to change your mindset when you play against those guys.”
Their recent success has made Fangio and Staley the hot names in defensive football, but several other coaches have quietly implemented strategies with shared DNA to the Fangio-Staley model. For years, Jets head coach and former 49ers defensive coordinator Robert Saleh was known as a Pete Carroll disciple who espoused the same single-high philosophy that Carroll implemented in Seattle. But over the past few seasons, Saleh and the coaches who’ve worked with him have taken an illuminating turn.
According to TruMedia, the 49ers ran Quarters (Cover-4) on 213 of their first- and second-down snaps. That ranked second in the NFL, behind only the Rams (218). The Browns, coordinated by former Niners’ secondary coach Joe Woods, ranked third. It’s no coincidence that the coaches who’ve had a front-row seat to the particulars of the league’s most popular offensive system have all adopted a similar approach for how to stop it. Cleveland and San Francisco incorporate different front structures than the Rams, but on the back end, they’ve prioritized eliminating explosive passes over stopping the run on early downs.
“You may play a little more coverage against guys like that,” Woods said of the Shanahan tree. “You want to protect yourself against the explosives. When you’re playing split-safety, people may look at it like the defense is softer, you really have the potential to put nine guys in the box. It’s just that they’re coming from depth.”
Quarters coverage isn’t a new idea, but earlier iterations of it were more aggressive, with all four secondary players set in a straight line across the field and the safeties having to quickly trigger to stop the run. “We used to say birds on a wire,” Rodgers said. “So, four guys on the same depth, 8-10 yards, straight across.”
Green Bay used to deploy what Rodgers calls “read routes” to attack those looks, sending a receiver straight at the safety as if to block him before taking a route vertically. As one NFL play-caller put it, “Against typical Quarters, you’re throwing posts all day.”
The newer type of Quarters sweeping the league is far less daring. Rodgers says that it’s inspired by the “Palms” coverage that Fangio has long favored, which features two high safeties with no role in fitting the run. By removing their run responsibilities, both safeties can play with more depth and help negate throws down the field. Different coaches use different imagery when talking about this modified version of Quarters. Some call it an umbrella. Others refer to it as a “dome” look. Staley likes to say he’s putting a “roof” over the defense.
Whatever the terminology, the goal is the same: Force offenses to beat you without the benefit of 30- and 40-yard shot plays. And as that philosophy starts to proliferate around the league, offenses will have to rethink what they’ve been programmed to believe about how to score in the modern NFL. “I think there’s gonna be much less margin for error for the efficiency that’s necessary,” McVay said. “It’s much harder to hunt out those explosives. There’s a premium on offenses that are efficient and explosive.”
Soon after taking the job as the Packers’ defensive coordinator earlier this year, Joe Barry came face-to-face with the players responsible for his undoing. Barry was the linebackers coach for a Rams team that ultimately fell to the Packers at Lambeau Field in the divisional round of the 2021 playoffs. That afternoon, the Rams’ top-rated defense allowed the longest pass and run that it’d given up all season as Green Bay rolled to a 32-18 win. “Like I tell [Aaron Rodgers], ‘Thank God that I’m with you guys now,” Barry said.
No offense was able to exploit the Rams’ defensive strategy quite like the Packers did last season — and that’s because few units around the league are as disciplined as Green Bay’s. That calm and collected approach begins with Rodgers, who honed the ability to pick his spots during nearly a decade of games against Lovie Smith’s Bears.
“That’s always what I had to mentally wrap my head around playing the Bears for so many years: ‘It’s gonna be a checkdown game,’” Rodgers said. “It’s gonna be a dink-and-dunk game — until they come out of their scheme.’”
In 2007, when Rodgers was backing up Brett Favre, the Bears played 14 straight snaps of soft Tampa 2 coverage. “I’m just thinking, ‘Are you kidding me?” Rodgers said. “They’re not gonna do anything different? But that’s what this defense was predicated on.”
Unlike more antsy quarterbacks and play callers, the Packers are comfortable taking whatever gains a defense provides, no matter how modest. It leaves Rodgers and Co. well equipped to prod Staley’s defense for vulnerabilities in a way few others can. “They ran the football, and Aaron is the best quick-game thrower of all time,” Staley said of the playoff matchup with Green Bay. “He got into a rhythm. We put a roof over ‘em. It wasn’t like that was happening. But they were steady down the field.”
The Packers-Rams matchup from last year provides a basic blueprint for how teams might address the new wave of Staley-influenced defenses, and that plan starts with the mentality an offense brings into the game. The standoff between Staley and Matt LaFleur represents the broader staring contest that the former’s defense sets into motion. When describing the Packers’ success that afternoon, Staley uses the word “patience” four times. In structuring their defenses, Staley and Fangio are making a bet against the impulsive nature of their opponents. Their hope is that in the midst of an extended drive consisting of short gains, a play-caller or quarterback gets restless and seeks out the explosive gain they’ve been trained to hunt. “What happens is, most offensive coordinators, they can’t handle that,” Hackett said. They get bored … You can’t get bored with success. But you have to define what success is for you.”
Green Bay’s plan in the playoffs was to slowly and methodically chip away at the foundation of the Rams’ philosophy. In the same way that offenses might struggle taking short gains, it’s difficult for defenses to repeatedly give them up. Hackett says that against the Rams’ type of umbrella coverage, out- and in-breaking routes for short gains can be effective. On a second-and-8 the Packers’ opening drive, Rodgers hit Davante Adams on a quick out at the sticks that picked up an easy first down. By repeatedly making the Rams pay for providing that cushion, Rodgers was able to test the Rams’ resolve to keep allowing those short completions. Facing a first- and-10 with less than a minute in the second quarter, Rodgers called a double-move off the same route stem from Adams and hit him for a chunk play down the right sideline.
“We’re just trying to pull them up real slow, we’re trying to reel ‘em in a little bit,” Rodgers said as he casted an imaginary fishing rod. “I remember we talked that week about the importance of hitting the quick games to draw them up.”
The best example of Green Bay’s patience paying off came late in the fourth quarter, when Rodgers was able to hit Allen Lazard on a deep post off play action for a 58-yard touchdown that put the game away. To that point in the game, the Packers had been able to run the ball effectively and consistently, which Rodgers credits for setting up the game-sealing score. Set up as a Quarters safety to Lazard’s side, safety Jordan Fuller triggered on the run fake and was powerless as Lazard streaked down the middle of the field. In the broader staring contest that Staley’s defense sets up, the Rams blinked first.
“That’s the beauty of what we do,” Hackett said. “Everything is setting stuff up. Being patient, being patient, being efficient and just doing what your job is within your play. Our guys, not only are they talented players, but they’re so smart. They almost feel it happening. We paint this picture where it’s ”OK, slowly pick up yards, and all of a sudden, ‘Bam!’”
As teams around the NFL look to the Packers and other teams for solutions to the Staley problem, the answers they’re going to find are fairly…boring. There’s no silver bullet pass concept hidden in the depths of NFL playbooks, no exciting counterpunch to be found.
The plan starts with exploiting the light boxes that Staley and Fangio present with a dedication and ability to run the ball, an aspect of the game that Hackett believes has become something of a lost art.
“We watched it and were like, ‘We can’t do [play-action] passes,” Hackett said. “‘We can’t get explosive plays.’” We have to make them stop the run. Because we can run the ball every play on them.”
Green Bay’s trio of backs — Aaron Jones, Jamaal Williams, and A.J. Dillon — racked up 191 rushing yards against a Rams unit that had finished third in run-defense DVOA (and featured a hobbled version of Aaron Donald). “You could feel that physicality with those three runners,” Staley said. “I think that was a winning edge for them, just having three runners that are really talented, but they’re different. And they’re coming at you.”
To complement their running game, the Packers also have one of the NFL’s most effective RPO packages, which allows Rodgers to control the game in a way most quarterbacks can’t. The option to flip the ball out to Adams against unfavorable box counts gives Green Bay another outlet to pick up easy yardage against a team preventing explosive plays. For [Aaron], if we do call [those RPOs], that allows us to put people out on the perimeter and allow him to dictate,” Hackett said. “Now, all of a sudden, if you’re giving me this, I’m gonna let Davante Adams have the ball. If you’re not gonna challenge him, we’re gonna do it every single time. Just like if we handed the ball off and got six yards.”
Not every team has Aaron Rodgers and Davante Adams, but as Staley’s ideas travel, the importance of high-percentage completions and receivers who can create after the catch is only going to increase. The 49ers, who also had relative success against Staley last season, have been building their passing game around this idea for years. As the Niners defense transitioned to more dome Quarters coverage, its offense assembled a collection of playmaking receivers and devised the most efficient yards-after-catch offense in the entire NFL. In a league where more teams are trying to erase deep completions, it’s never been more crucial for offenses to find ways to turn 7-yard glance routes into 25-yard gains. As one offensive coordinator put it, “If [defenses] are gonna make you earn it, you better have a guy who can play a make or two.”
If there is one area down the field that offenses feel like they can exploit, it’s the space outside the numbers. At the simplest level, Staley’s defense makes the game as difficult as possible on quarterbacks, which means it’s no surprise that the throws most available to the offense are the ones that are most difficult to make. When asked where offenses can win, multiple coaches brought up the need to have a top-flight quarterback-receiver duo that can exploit the de-facto one-on-one matchups on the outside against Quarters coverage.
“The reliance on being able to throw the ball outside the numbers [will grow,]” Callahan said. “Do you have a guy that can go out and win? Do you have a guy that can throw the ball intermediate, down the field, outside the numbers and still be efficient? Because what they’re trying to do is collapse the middle of the field and not allow you to have free reign wherever you want to throw the ball.”
It’s no coincidence that McVay, the offensive coach with a more intimate knowledge of Staley’s defense than any other in the NFL, made an all-in move this offseason for Matthew Stafford — a quarterback whose arm and attitude allows him to stretch defenses horizontally like few passers in the league can.
When discussing the lessons he’s learned watching Staley’s defense up close, McVay refrains from coughing up all the secrets that he’s had to earn over plenty of maddening practice sessions. But one hint he will reveal is that the days of dialing up pointed plays designed to go after specific coverages are coming to an end.
“You’ve got to be able to activate more all-purpose plays,” McVay said. “We might be calling something defensively, and based on whatever the play is, it might look like something else. It takes certain plays to really reveal and express exactly what we’re doing defensively.”
In the passing game, that means calling more multi-use plays that could potentially work against multiple coverages and leaning on concepts where receivers are forced to read and react to the coverage contours in real time. If that sounds difficult, that’s because it is.
“The disguise thing is hard because people that want to get the perfect play, they don’t know exactly what they’re getting,” Hackett said. “So you might have to have more call it-run it, which makes you simplify down again. You go to more all-purpose, which might not be an explosive all the time.”
Along with being unpredictable in coverage, the Rams also do an expert job of staying one step ahead with their fronts. Even as teams turn to the run game as a means of attacking Staley-influenced defenses, the various fronts and unconventional personnel packages that the Rams use also make finding chunk gains on the ground a challenge. Most of the league’s most potent run games do an expert job of creating angles with various motions to build in cutback lanes that turn 5-yard runs into 25-yard gashes. That’s harder to pull off when a defense is consistently lining up in ways that are nearly impossible to predict. “A lot of people are trained to say, ‘I’m taking this block to the Mike linebacker,’” Hackett said. “But then the linebacker’s not [in that spot]. He’s way over there … That defense was rare. It was something where we had to think to ourselves, ‘Let’s breathe.’ Let’s simplify it down. Let’s coach up the techniques and really take a step back to major basics.”
So, to recap here: the most effective ways to combat this defense include more running (which is inherently less efficient), more short completions (which require longer, mistake-free drives), and simpler play calls less capable of creating chunk gains. With answers like that, there’s a reason this system of defense is about to take the league by storm.
This offseason, as offensive coaches around the league worked on ways to answer his defense and others like it, Staley has been working on his own modifications. He knows that as more defensive systems start to resemble his own, he and the Chargers staff will have to work even harder to stay ahead of the curve. “I think that we have to look at how teams started to attack you later in the year when they have more inventory of your defense,” Staley said. “So you look at ‘What trended as the season went on? Were there common themes?’ I think that’s part of it. You’re always anticipating where the NFL’s going. You’re aware of how other offenses are playing and what’s working for people.”
Other offenses will undoubtedly try to poach ideas that the Packers used with success last January. The question is whether that cold day in Green Bay was an exception that other offenses will struggle to replicate. With a healthy Donald back in the lineup and most offenses lacking a quarterback with Rodgers’ profound discipline, can other teams apply what they’ve learned from the Packers’ blueprint?
Rodgers has seen plenty of trends come and go during his 17 years in the NFL. The next few years will prove if this one is built to last.
“That’s why these fads don’t last forever,” Rodgers said. “Eventually people catch up because you realize when you play against that every day what gives that the most trouble. Slowly — in a league that loves gossip — that stuff starts to filter out and around to the rest of the league.”
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