on the WP D (since mini-camp), w/ a long one on WP's defenses over the years

Good news, Rams fans: Wade Phillips has a history of quickly making defenses great
Hiring Phillips to improve a team’s defense has immediately worked out many, many times before

Will Brinson

http://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/good-news-rams-fans-wade-phillips-has-a-history-of-quickly-making-defenses-great/

Despite an offseason that qualifies as more or less successful, the Rams are being largely ignored as a potential sleeper team to make a leap in the NFC. Some projections are real down on Los Angeles, with SportsLine’s computer system pegging them for a paltry four wins for the year and the worst record in the NFL.
There is reason for pessimism, particularly on offense, where Jared Goff, despite his lofty status as a first-round pick in 2016, remains an unknown at the quarterback position. Drafting Cooper Kupp was one of our favorite moves, but can an offense with Tavon Austin, Robert Woods and Kupp support Goff? Those are uninspiring top targets relative to the rest of the league. Adding Andrew Whitworth should pay big dividends. It’s not unreasonable to expect a bounceback year in a new (read: not Jeff Fisher’s) system from Todd Gurley, who looked like a top-five NFL running back in his rookie season.
Defensively is where things get very interesting though. The Rams didn’t make a ton of changes in terms of personnel on that side of the ball — adding Connor Barwin in free agency, retaining Trumaine Johnson and picking up some intriguing draft picks like Josh Johnson, Samson Ebukam and Ejuan Price are the only moves of note — but they did make a drastic change at defensive coordinator by hiring Wade Phillips.
The “Son of Bum” is one of the best defensive coordinators the game of football has ever seen, even if his reputation as a head coach sometimes belied his success building out defenses (also, Phillips wasn’t as bad a head coach as most people would have you believe, winning 60 percent of his games with the Cowboys and Bills, but that’s a different story altogether).

What Phillips does really well is improve defenses when he’s able to get his hands on new players. An update from Football Outsiders to their win total projections — which actually has the Rams winning a surprising eight games — and a note from Aaron Schatz about Phillips’ Year 1 improvement caught my eye and potentially portends an impact from Phillips’ defense early on.
At the very least it prompted me to take a deeper dive into his team-by-team success and see what it might tell us about the Rams’ possible improvement on that side of the ball.

1981 New Orleans Saints

Phillips started his coordinator career working for his dad, Bum Phillips, with the 1981 Saints. (Notable aside: Wade was coordinating defenses in the NFL five years before his new boss, head coach Sean McVay, was born.)
The ‘Aints were coming off a 1-15 season in 1980 when Bum took over as head coach and brought along Wade as his defensive coordinator. That 1980 team finished 28th in points allowed and, at the time, was arguably the worst team in NFL history, the first ever franchise to go 1-15.
1981 did not feature marked improvement in terms of their record (4-12), but the offense featured George Rogers rushing for 1,674 yards and winning Offensive Rookie of the Year honors, while the defense took some subtle steps forward under Wade’s first-year guidance. The 1981 Saints managed a top-15 defense in yards allowed (80 less than the season before) and shaved nearly seven points per game off their average allowed from the year prior, although the rank did not dramatically increase. Football Outsiders does not have DVOA records from that far back, and sacks weren’t recorded until 1982.
In 1982, however, New Orleans took a big step forward defensively, becoming a top-10 defense in both yards allowed and points allowed in Phillips’ second season. That was a strike-shortened season and New Orleans would finish just 4-5, but also recorded a whopping 31 sacks in just nine games. That’s one more than the 2016 Saints had all of last year.

1986 Philadelphia Eagles

Wade would remain in New Orleans through the 1985 season, when he took over for his dad as interim coach after Bum resigned midseason. Wade wasn’t retained and would end up landing with Buddy Ryan and the Eagles the next year. Philadelphia was actually a good defensive team before he got there, ranking 10th in both points and yards allowed. That team totaled 53 sacks, with Reggie White (then a rookie) and Greg Brown picking up 13 each.
In White’s second season, he would take off, landing Pro Bowl and All-Pro awards as he recorded 18 sacks in Phillips’ attack. Oddly, the defense actually regressed in terms of its rank, although it more or less stayed the same in terms of points and yards allowed in the first season under Ryan and Phillips.

It is also worth noting that White had three seaons in his Hall of Fame career where he recorded at least 18 sacks. All three of those were under Phillips.

1989 Denver Broncos

This is where the Phillips Factor really started to take place. With Wade sort of running his own show — versus working for his dad/Buddy — after taking over for Joe Collier in Denver, the Broncos absolutely took off. Simon Fletcher recorded 12 sacks and kickstarted a run of double-digit sack seasons that would coincide exactly with Phillips’ time in Denver. Karl Mecklenberg recorded 143 tackles, 7.5 sacks and two forced fumbles en route to All Pro honors and the best season of his career.
Phillips had plenty of defensive acumen built in just from a genetic perspective. It is fascinating how quickly he got things rolling with Denver after coming off lengthy stints learning under two of the best in Bum and Buddy. Clearly he took things away from each of them, with an infusion of defensive principles from Ryan’s 46 defense blending into his own defensive playbook.
“Buddy Ryan, yeah,” Phillips recalled back in 2010 when talking about his time with the Eagles. “I’ve got a whole book on that. A whole chapter of the book anyway. Buddy was very aggressive. Defensive-minded. Very sharp on the 46 [defense] stuff, all defenses really. I enjoyed being around him. He was really a gifted mind as far as defense was concerned and hopefully I pulled some of those things from him.
“I’ve added some stuff from everybody I’ve been with. I went to Philadelphia to work with Buddy Ryan because his 46 was the hot defense at the time. I got an opportunity to learn Buddy’s philosophy. We still use some things from that.”

1995 Buffalo Bills

Here was another example of a team that was supposed to be a contender falling on hard times (the Bills went 7-9, which would be a great season by modern Buffalo standards, after a 14-2 year in 1993) looking to Phillips to reinvigorate the defense. The Bills would win 10 games and the AFC East in 1995 and make impressive jumps in points and yards rankings, but more impressively in their DVOA spike from 19th to 10th.

Phillips coaxed a 10.5-sack season out of a 32-year-old Bruce Smith, who would proceed to register double-digit sacks for the next four years while working under Phillips. Not bad for a guy well past his prime in football playing years. Smith has long sung Phillips’ praises, but he was also a Hall of Famer before Wade got to Buffalo.

Bryce Paup is a different story. The outside linebacker for the Bills had some success before Phillips’ arrival in Buffalo, but he exploded in 1995 for 17.5 sacks — a career high by 6.5 — and was named Defensive Player of the Year. Getting a guy like Paup to have that kind of season in his first year is the sort of stuff that should make Rams fans drool.
“To me, that’s what coaching is. It’s not scheme, it’s what the players can do,” Phillips recalled in 2014 when asked about success with guys like Paup. “If your scheme or whatever it is you have doesn’t allow the players — especially the great ones — to do what they do best, then you need to change. The better the player is, the more freedom we give him to do more things, because he’ll tend to make better decisions than other players. It’s not just about being more talented. We’ve always tried to do that.”

2002 Atlanta Falcons

After an 8-8 season with the Bills in 2000, Phillips was fired for refusing to dismiss his special teams coach Ronnie Jones. It really does merit pointing out that Phillips went 29-19 with the Bills. That’s miracle-level stuff considering where the franchise has been since; they haven’t won more than nine games since Phillips won 11 in 1999. At any rate, he was a free agent and landed with his old pal Dan Reeves in Atlanta. The Falcons were coming off a 7-9 season in 2001 that featured a below-average defense that was being run as a 4-3 under Don Blackmon.
This marks, we believe, the first real time Phillips came in and took a group that was running the 4-3 and flipped them to his 3-4 approach.

One of the key changes to look at here is how they utilized Patrick Kerney, who led the Falcons in sacks with 12 in 2001 in the old scheme. The plan initially was to move Kerney, who was 6-foot-5 and 273 pounds, to outside linebacker. Phillips eventually decided not to do that, letting him set up as a 3-4 end who didn’t have to worry about dropping back into coverage.
“He could have played [outside linebacker], and he would have done well,” Phillips said in August of 2002. “He was only dropping back 25 percent of the time, but that’s 25 percent too much for your best defensive lineman. We need him rushing the passer every time. There’s no way to do that at outside linebacker.”
Kerney had put in reps at linebacker throughout the summer and said it made him “move better” and that his “burst off the ball is better.” But there was enough depth at linebacker that Phillips felt comfortable putting him at end. He would still finish with 10.5 sacks from the position.
Seven players would finish with more than three sacks for that Falcons team, including four guys who played linebacker. The previous season the Falcons had five, with only one (Keith Brooking) playing linebacker. That’s sort of the hallmark of Phillips teams, pressure coming from different places and just harassing quarterbacks off the edge.
Things went off a cliff for Atlanta in Year 2 under Phillips, who ended up having to play the role of interim coach for Dan Reeves (again!) and shepherding a unit that was bottom five in points and yards allowed.

2004 San Diego Chargers

The next stop for Wade was the Chargers, where he again took over for a coach (Dale Lindsey) running a 4-3 defense without a lot of statistical success. That 2003 team managed a paltry 30 sacks, with defensive tackle DeQuincy Scott (6.5) and Adrian Dingle (six) leading the way. Quarterbacks could host parties in the pocket against a Chargers team that finished 4-12 in Marty Schottenheimer’s second season.
Things got better defensively the following year, when the Chargers won 12 games after drafting Philip Rivers and watching Drew Brees finally break out into the quarterback they drafted, when he threw for 27 touchdowns and just seven interceptions.

Again, this is a case of shifting defensive personnel entirely into a new scheme and having a tremendous amount of success. It’s not like they spent all their draft capital on defensive players either. Remember, the Chargers drafted Philip Rivers (well, technically Eli Manning) with their first-round pick. It’s also easy to forget they used a third-round pick (No. 65 overall!) on Nate Kaeding. They would use a second-round pick on Igor Olshansky and a fourth-round pick on Shaun Phillips, both of whom paid immediate dividends.
Olshansky became a starter at the 3-4 end position out of the gate. Shaun Phillips didn’t start right away but he recorded four sacks and a pick as a backup outside linebacker as a rookie. This team only recorded 29 sacks but they were substantially improved at letting the Chargers know they’d set up the position well for the future and they would double down the next year with Shawne Merriman, setting the stage for their incredible 2006 season and Wade Phillips landing the Cowboys job.

2007 Dallas Cowboys

The most underrated stop of Wade’s coaching career came when he followed in the footsteps of Bill Parcells (good luck with that) and promptly went 13-3 in his first year on the gig. There was no transition in terms of the defense, because Parcells ran a 3-4, but there was also no playoff win, which is what people got worked up about when it came to Wade and Tony Romo (especially a year after the botched snap against the Seahawks). Nevermind that Romo threw for 4,200 yards and 36 touchdowns.

It really can’t be overstated that Wade took a good defense that was being coached by Bill Parcells and Mike Zimmer and actually made it better despite any real significant additions outside of Ken Hamlin, who was added in free agency and promptly made his first and only Pro Bowl. Jay Ratliff also stepped into the starting lineup and DeMarcus Ware matured as he entered his third year. But it was largely the same defensive unit.

2011 Houston Texans

Phillips was relieved of his duties midway through the 2010 season (the first time Jerry Jones ever fired a coach midseason somehow) but didn’t even make it out of the state of Texas before finding work, as Gary Kubiak scooped him up. Phillips was part of a group that greatly encouraged the front office to draft J.J. Watt — it almost didn’t happen if you believe Phillips from 2014 — and that was part of the transformation for this defense.
Transformation might not even be the right word. The Texans went from being one of the worst defenses in the NFL to being one of the best overnight.

A lot of people will point to the addition of Watt in 2011, and that’s fair. But he wasn’t even the Defensive Rookie of the Year (Von Miller was) and by far the bigger deal was the move of Mario Williams from 4-3 defensive end to 3-4 outside linebacker. This was a huge deal before the season and many folks expected him to potentially become the next DeMarcus Ware. Williams would get injured and only play in five games, but he did record five sacks in those games. He was on pace to having a big year.

The difference is that the personnel, once you factored in the addition of Watt and Brooks Reed, simply fit Philips’ system better. The front seven featured big bodies better served as defensive ends in that system (Antonio Smith, Shaun Cody, Watt) and a bevy of athletic linebackers (Connor Barwin, Brian Cushing, Reed, DeMeco Ryans) who could fly around in the system.
The addition of Johnathan Joseph in free agency allowed Kareem Jackson to become less of a target for opposing quarterbacks and the combination of that and the improved front seven helped the secondary become substantially more secure.
Phillips and the Texans benefited greatly from offseason additions, but the implementation of his scheme and his coaching made a massive difference in improving the quality of this roster.
The Texans and Chargers should be considered reasonable blueprints for how the Rams will look moving forward. So should his next stop.

2015 Denver Broncos

Like Houston and San Diego, Denver was utilizing a 4-3 scheme (this one under Jack Del Rio) when they hired Wade Phillips in 2014. The Broncos were coming off a pair of years in which they were dominant on the offensive side of the ball, with Peyton Manning shattering every quarterback and scoring record on the books as Denver blitzed through the regular season in 2013 and then putting up huge numbers again in 2014. Unfortunately they were handed a reality check when the Seahawks annihilated them in the Super Bowl 43-8, a stark and sudden reminder that defense does in fact win championships. A loss to the Colts in the divisional round the following year was a humiliating last straw.
John Elway, as he is often wont to do, retooled the roster and coaching staff. He hired his old offensive coordinator Gary Kubiak, who brought in his old defensive coordinator in Phillips. Denver’s defense in 2014 was actually good — credit Del Rio for coaching up a quality unit that ended up being a top-five team by DVOA. (This is also where DVOA is helpful, because with a powerful offensive team like the Broncos, often garbage-time points are accrued.)
But as has been the case with Phillips before in his career, he took a very good defense and made them outstanding.

The Broncos would win the Super Bowl in the first year with Kubiak and Phillips, stopping a powerful Panthers offense in its tracks and mollywhopping MVP Cam Newton in a physical game in Santa Clara.
The players for this defense were the same/similar, although the starters were different. Darian Stewart replaced Rahim Moore in the backfield. The biggest change came at linebacker, with familiar face Ware shifting to outside linebacker (from a 4-3 DE in Del Rio’s scheme) and Miller dropping outside as well. Inside, Danny Trevathan and Brandon Marshall (both on the roster in 2014) emerged as starters, while Malik Jackson (drafted in 2012) stepped up as a starter on the defensive line alongside Derek Wolfe and Sylvester Williams.
The Broncos’ championship team is often thought of as a roster that John Elway assembled via free agency, but the reality is that on defense there were a ton of players they acquired through the draft that allowed Phillips to utilize his 3-4 defense. And those guys should cut Wade a check too, because many of them got paid after the title run.

So … the Rams

That was a really (comma really comma really) long way of saying this: Wade Phillips has a decades-long history of making defenses better in his first year as defensive coordinator. Whether it’s shifting the scheme, taking over a bad defense or even taking over a good defense, Wade takes that unit to another level almost immediately.
The Los Angeles Rams are, frankly, a combination of all of that. They have been running a 4-3 since Jeff Fisher took over in 2012 and have had a bunch of defensive talent for the past few years (and at time been a good defense) but dipped last year a bit in terms of both points allowed and DVOA.

Much is being made of the personnel on hand and whether it fits what Phillips does, but his track record shows a guy who fits personnel to his defense. Also: people are actually concerned about where Aaron Donald will fit in, which is like moving a shark from salt to freshwater and wondering if he can find something to eat. Sharks are going to eat. It’s what they do.

Donald obviously won’t be moving to outside linebacker and probably won’t be moving in to nose tackle. Maybe the concern is that he might be undersized for a prototypical 3-4 defensive end, but look at what Phillips said about the position as it relates to guys like Bruce Smith and J.J. Watt.
“When you get guys like [Watt and Smith] you let them do more things. J.J.’s really smart, so certain formations he could start one way and other formations we let him line up differently,” Philips said. “We let him go. We let him take off. We didn’t want him just standing on the line playing the old two-gap defense. That’s what you do with the great ones. You let them instinctually go where they think the play’s going to be. Rush the passer when they think it’s a passing down, and vice versa when they suspect a run.
“You give them a lot more leeway. It doesn’t matter what defense you run. It’s the players involved in it, and what you let them do.”
That’s why people should be enthusiastic about Donald in this scheme. He might not be the “right size,” but he wasn’t the “right size” coming out of college either, which is why he fell to the middle of the first round. He’s an explosive athlete, a terror at the line of scrimmage and in the backfield — Pro Football Focus credits him with 52 quarterback hurries and 22 quarterback hits last year, by far the most of any defensive tackle.
Donald should line up alongside Michael Brockers, who at 6-foot-5 and 322 pounds makes for a very logical fit as the interior linchpin of the defensive line in the base formation, and potentially Dominique Easley as the other defensive end. Easley and Donald have obnoxiously fast first steps; if Brockers is soaking up multiple men they are going to be terrifying, even more so when you think about the linebackers involved.
Robert Quinn is going to be the real wild card for this defense. Quinn hasn’t been healthy the last two years — playing in just 17 games combined — but prior to 2015 his star was ascending. He was a two-time Pro Bowl player with 29.5 sacks in 2013 and 2014. He recently confirmed he’ll slot as one of the outside linebackers in Phillips’ system, and it’s not hard to imagine him wrecking havoc from that spot.
“I don’t know if I’m saying too much, I am still in the D-line room, but I am considered a linebacker.” Quinn said. “So I have to know a little bit of rushing the passer and dropping into coverage.”

Watch his weight — he’s listed at 6-foot-4 and 270 pounds, which might be heavier than you’d want for the position (Von Miller was listed at 6-3, 237 last year, while DeMarcus Ware was listed at 6-4, 247). He is a big-time bounceback candidate if he stays on the field and a deep sleeper for DPOY honors if he plays 16 games.
The Rams added Connor Barwin this offseason as a free agent. The fit there is pretty obvious; he’s got a long history playing for Phillips and should serve as another one of the outside linebackers. The depth at this position is a pretty big red flag, and if Quinn and Barwin aren’t healthy (or if Quinn just isn’t healthy), the pass rush could suffer.
Two rookies to look at for possible production, though, are Ejuan Price out of Pittsburgh (seventh round) and Samson Ebukam out of Eastern Washington (fourth round). Both come with question marks, Price being extremely small and Ebukam coming from a small school. But both had really nice production in college — Price recorded 24.5 sacks the last two seasons while Ebukam, a raw, explosive athlete who put together the third-highest SPARQ score of any EDGE prospect in this class, produced 9.5 sacks last year.
The tandem of Alec Ogletree and Mark Barron (a former first-round pick as a safety now converted to linebacker) is reminiscent of the group he inherited in both Houston and Denver. Both guys are quick-twitch playmakers and thumpers who complement the outside group nicely.
In the secondary, the retention of Trumaine Johnson feels silly from a financial perspective (the Rams are using a second franchise tag on him) but making sure you have at least one top-end corner isn’t silly at all. The Rams should work out a long-term deal with him if they can — if the front seven does what it could do, then he might have a year justifying his salary and might be unwilling to take anything short of big money on the open market.
E.J. Gaines wouldn’t be a surprise to see at the top of the first depth chart, but don’t sleep on Kayvon Webster, who was signed as an unrestricted free agent from the Broncos this offseason. Experience in Phillips’ defense should be considered a big plus here. LaMarcus Joyner and Maurice Alexander, both taken with early round picks in the 2014 draft, are probably starting at the safety positions.
Honestly, when you break this defense down at each level, there’s not a whole lot of concern here. There isn’t much of a shift for these guys to a 3-4 defense from the 4-3 they were running. And this was a group that was pretty good for a few years but never really great. The Donald size and positional concerns — like his contract situation — are drastically overblown.
“If he can’t fit in, you’re doing the wrong thing,” Phillips said of Donald. “He can probably fit into any defense.”
As we should learn by now, Phillips isn’t often doing the wrong thing when it comes to his first year with a new team. And the Rams look like the latest unit primed to get a bump from a major edge in coaching. It shouldn’t be a shock to anyone if Phillips turns this team into a top-10 or even top-five defense by the end of 2017.

Blue and Gold wrote:

With Quinn at OLB, there will be times you have to use him in coverage. That’s the whole point of a 3-4 as opposed to a 4-3. Since the way Wade runs it, it’s a one-gap 3-4 and they have said DOnald will always be the 3-tech, so that will not change, the point of a 3-4 is the element of surprise of where your 4 or 5 rushers will come from. If you use Quinn as a rusher all the time, then why not play him in a down position and play a 3-4?

Now, in sub packages (nickel and dime) he will have his hand in the grass, as will Barwin and the 2 DTs, so that does not change

But in the 3-4 if Barwin always covers and Quinn always rushes, then why sign Barwin? He’s essentially a guy who can rush and cover, like he did for wade and in Philly.

If we understand Wade’s theory that the 3-4 is better than the 4-3 (base defense versus base offense) then Quinn has to drop sometimes, otherwise there is no reason to run a 3-4.

And remember by rush, I mean, when they are playing the base defense and opposing team throws…if Barwin rarely rushes then that right tackle will never really get challenged.

Point is, Quinn will have to drop SOME… will it be 10%? 15%? more? a bit less? That is the right question.

Looking at Wade’s Denver D here is one play where Ware has the RB in man coverage

then there is three stills. he has the TE in a bump, then settles in zone coverage.

So Ware had to play SOME coverage, not a lot, but the scheme calls for it sometimes and Quinn will have to be able to do it or he’ll be a 3rd down rusher and someone else will have to play WILL in base.