Organizational Chaos: Welcome to Gregg's World/PD

Organizational Chaos: Welcome to Gregg’s World
• By Jim Thomas

http://www.stltoday.com/sports/football/professional/organizational-chaos-welcome-to-gregg-s-world/article_54e7e17e-9130-5c28-935c-5365cc69e3c2.html

In January 2012, new Rams defensive coordinator Gregg Williams promised that practices would be louder, practices would be different, and players would be challenged on a daily basis.

Well, it took more than 2½ years to see it happen as a result of a one-year “Bountygate” suspension and a one-year pit stop in Tennessee. But it turns out Williams was right.

Early in camp, Rams defenders played the “up-down” game. Up-downs are an old-school football drill where players run in place, drop to the ground, and then spring back up quickly and repeatedly.

So picture this: Four big defensive linemen line up together and do a few up-downs, then sprint over to the sideline where three footballs are stationed — maybe 20, 25 yards away. The first three players there scoop up a football. The fourth guy to get there?

Well, he finished last. He has to do more up-downs.

Williams’ voice can be heard all over the field. It’s loud. He does voice training to make sure he never loses his voice. The comments often are salty, but we’ll edit out the curse words.

• A player messes up an assignment: ”That was your responsibility! Your responsibility!”

Everyone in Earth City now knows who messed up.

• A young player who has struggled early in camp finally makes a play. A good play.

“Well! Look who just showed up! Look who just showed up!”

The remark is well-seasoned with sarcasm.

He’s in your face. He’s over the top. He’s Gregg Williams, the man expected to sprinkle magic dust over the Rams defense, transforming it from decent/pretty good to real good/great in the blink of an eye.

Williams calls his approach Organizational Chaos. He likes to throw the unexpected at the players, challenge them on a daily basis.

“This is a production business,” Williams said. “What was your autograph yesterday? How did you perform yesterday? How did you meet, and how did you practice yesterday?”

And this applies not only on the practice field but in the meeting room as well.

“The meetings aren’t some place where you’re eating popcorn, drinking Coke and having a good time,” Williams said. “You’re getting ready to go out on the field of battle, and to win out there.

“We’re not gonna apologize for competing every single day in practice. We measure every play on who won and lost every single play in practice. And the very next day the meeting starts with wins and losses.”

He’s not kidding. Every day, it’s up there on the wall for every player on the defense. A report card, if you will, on how each player performed the previous day in practice and in the meeting room.

“We have a sophisticated grading system of how we graded every single meeting (and practice) …” Williams said. “It’s up there for everybody to take a look at. We’re not hiding it.

“Everybody in the room sees how you were graded that day. And if you’re a prideful man, you’re gonna rise to the challenge. If you’re not a prideful man, this is probably not the right business for you to be in.”

Williams doesn’t merely stand up in the meeting room and talk … and talk some more. He’ll walk around the room. Then he’ll sit down right next to a player and get in his face to ask about a call, an adjustment, or some facet of the game plan.

“I might get right about here,” Williams illustrates, suddenly zooming in uncomfortably close to a reporter’s face — maybe 6 inches away.

“And everybody in the room is looking at me talking to you about: ‘What’s your decision? What’s your call?’”

He doesn’t care where you were drafted, how much money you make, how many Pro Bowls you have to your name. He treats everyone the same, and if they’re not on their P’s and Q’s that day in the classroom, they run the danger of being embarrassed.

“I’ve been real hard on them” in camp, Williams said.

But it’s that way everywhere he goes. Pierson Prioleau knows this better than most.

Before his suspension in the “Bountygate” pay-for-performance scandal, Williams had worked at four places since leaving Jeff Fisher’s Tennessee Titans to become a head coach in 2001: Buffalo (head coach), Washington, Jacksonville and New Orleans. (He was defensive coordinator at the other three stops.)

Prioleau, a now-retired safety, played at all four stops of those post-Tennessee assignments for Williams.

“Gregg is very psychological,” said Prioleau, who helped coach during Rams training camp this summer as part of the Bill Walsh Minority Coaching Fellowship program.

“The first thing he wants to do is create a culture. He’s a very intense coach, and a lot of his motivation is done mentally. So the culture that he creates — practice habits, study habits, work habits, eating habits, exercise habits … he tries to make the game as easy as possible.”

In a nutshell, Williams tries to put the players under so much pressure on the practice field and in the meeting room that the game seems like a walk in the park.

What is fascinating about the concept is that Williams — whom Fisher has referred to as a “mad scientist” — takes a similar approach to the former Rams offensive coordinator and head coach known as “Mad Mike.”

That’s right, Mike Martz used the same tactics, mainly with young unproven quarterbacks, and other players to some degree. They’d be put under so much pressure by Martz during the week that the games then seemed that much easier.

“Mike and I have talked about this,” Williams said.

While Rams defensive players might have thought he was a little loony at first, Williams said they have responded well. He quickly learned that the defensive players are eager to learn and hungry to become a top drawer defense.

“These guys have been fantastic, they really have,” Williams said. “Because we’ve been hard on what we’ve asked ‘em to do. And how much we’ve demanded them to do.”

Prioleau, now a high school coach in Virginia, says it’s never personal.

“He’s trying to sharpen you,” Prioleau said. “He kinda puts you under fire to turn you into something special. I’ve seen it work throughout the years with lots of players.

“I’ve seen it work with Roman Harper in New Orleans. I’ve seen it work with Sean Taylor in Washington. I’ve seen it work with a lot of raw, talented players that needed to find out how to be professional football players.”

And on game day, Williams, as he puts it, likes to “Let these guys hunt. Let these guys play.”

Within the parameters of the scheme, he gives players the flexibility to make calls, checks, audibles and technique changes. He already has a lot of faith in middle linebacker James Laurinaitis and free safety Rodney McLeod to be coaches on the field. The same goes for outside linebacker Jo-Lonn Dunbar, who knows the system well from his time with Williams in New Orleans.

Obviously, those three know how to make sense of the chaos.