MOBILE, Ala. – After a successful run leading the defense of the New Orleans Saints, one of football’s winningest teams in the past three seasons, the decision to move to St. Louis for Gregg Williams was one that boiled down to two simple concepts, neither of which had much to do with X’s and O’s and everything to do with important personal relationships.
“One is when you can’t tell your best friend no, that’s probably the biggest reason,” Williams said. “Jeff Fisher and I are very, very close. Friendships and relationships in this industry are hard to come by. I have a very close and tight circle of friends. Not very many people get inside that circle, but a young guy from Los Angeles and a young guy from the countryside and the sticks of Missouri developed a friendship a long time ago in the early 90’s and we worked together for an awful long time. I consider Jeff one of my closest friends. He needed my help and I couldn’t tell him no.”
Williams didn’t tell Fisher no when he came calling and the Rams officially named Williams the team’s new defensive coordinator on Monday.
It wasn’t just that relationship with Fisher that brought Williams to St. Louis, though.
“Then the fact that I get a chance to come back to the state of Missouri,” Williams said. “I was born and raised in Excelsior Springs, Missouri. I have a big foundation that raises money for kids up there. It’s only four and a half hours away. My kids have grown up kind of away from their grandparents and their aunts and uncles and cousins as I’ve bounced around the country in this nomadic coaching profession that there is. They get a chance to be a little bit closer to home, the ones that aren’t in college.”
Sure, there were likely other reasons for Williams’ departure from the Saints to the Rams but at its very core, Williams made it clear that the things most important to him at this point in his coaching career aren’t things but people.
Williams and Fisher have known each other a long time and first forged their strong bond with Tennessee where they were in the same roles they are now for six seasons together. In that time, the Titans were known for having one of the stoutest defenses in the league, including a group that led the league in total defense, allowing just 191 points and setting franchise records for sacks (55), fewest passing yards allowed (2,424) and fewest touchdowns allowed (17) in 2000.
Known for his exotic blitz packages and relentless, creative ways of getting after the quarterback, Williams brings a resume bursting with impressive references from his coaching history.
Defensive coaching luminaries such as George Allen, Jack Pardee and Buddy Ryan have directly influenced Williams’ coaching style. Along the way, he’s picked up bits and pieces from guys like Dom Capers, George Seifert and Dick LeBeau.
With all of those ingredients in the pot, Williams was asked to take them all and create his own recipe for defensive success.
“I’ve had a chance to work under some really good defensive people,” Williams said. “But when Jeff Fisher turned all that over to me many, many, many years ago, his mandate and his challenge to me was to hybridize that system of defense and continue to add to it…I’ve kind of hybridized it to the point where now it’s the Gregg Williams philosophy of defense. People in my family tree and coaching tree kind of know some of the nuances of that. What you do is you try to maximize the strengths of the guys you have and we can migrate from a 4-3 philosophy to the 3-4 philosophy and migrate back to all the different kind of substitution packages and nickel defenses and 30 defenses and all that kind of stuff. We can do it all, and it’s not as complicated as everybody thinks.”
Because Williams has only recently been brought on board to lead the Rams defense, he hasn’t yet had the opportunity to make many determinations on what he thinks of the personnel in place.
The Rams finished second to last in run defense in 2011 and were 22nd in total defense a year after moving up to 17th in the league against the run and 19th overall in total defense. The biggest drop came in points allowed where the Rams fell from 12th (20.5 points allowed per game) in 2010 to 26th (25.4 points allowed per game) in 2011.
Williams wouldn’t identify some of the players already in place that he likes but did go as far as to say there are clearly some pieces in place that he was fond of when they were drafted.
“There are a lot of guys on this particular team that I wanted to draft,” Williams said. “Now I’ve caught up with them. They were on my particular list where if I had the opportunity to draft them, if they came off the board at the time that I could do that, I would have liked to do that. I’ve kind of caught up with those guys. I know the roster pretty well, but until you work side by side with a person, until you go through the ups and downs, the toughness and the stresses of a season, you truly don’t know anybody. I’m looking forward to all of them. And one of the things is that everybody’s going to be interviewing for a position. There’s nothing given here. You’ll find that out from Jeff Fisher and me also. Every day is an interview, and if you interview well today, you get to play. You don’t interview well today, then you don’t play. That’s just how it goes.”
In terms of the system that Williams has “hybridized,” he says there isn’t necessarily a commitment to doing things any one way. Part of Williams’ success in each of his NFL stops – he’s coached a top 5 defense at each of his NFL destinations – is his ability to be flexible and put the players on the roster in the best positions to succeed.
That means you could see a 3-4 front at times or a 4-3 or even variations of the old 46 defense he learned from Ryan. No matter the look of the front, Williams’ group will be prepared and aggressive.
“What we’ll do defensively here is I’ll adapt to them; they won’t adapt to me,” Williams said. “What you’ll see is that everywhere I’ve gone, I’ve been able to get a top five defense during the time I’m there, anywhere from one to four, one to five, in all of the stops I’ve made. When we do that, it’s because I will adapt to the strengths of the people there. I think coaches make mistakes when they try to pigeonhole players into what they’re comfortable with. I’m very comfortable in my own skin. I feel like my job is, my charge is, to find the strength of every single person I get a chance to coach and/or coach with on the coaching staff and utilize their strengths and try to hide their weaknesses. We all have warts, we all have weaknesses, but we all have strengths, too. So let’s find out, let’s spend a lot of time and energies on finding out the strengths and weaknesses of everybody and highlight the strengths and hide the weakness.”
In addition to the trademark blitzes and various looks Williams likes to use, he has always preached the importance of creating turnovers. Sometimes that can come at the expense of big plays going the other way but more often than not, it’s something that has bounced in the favor of those defenses.
“It probably is one of the single most important statistics in football anymore is the turnover/takeaway ratio,” Williams said. “When you have a good quarterback, especially if you’re with a good quarterback on your team, it’s providing him an extra opportunity to attack the opposing defenses and then shortening the opportunities you have on points scoring against your own defense. That’s a huge stat. I think one of the reasons why players love playing in the style and the system of defenses that we play, the different packages that we play, we’re going to attack in everything that we do. We’re going to be aggressive. We would like to be able to defensively have the last say instead of the offense having the last say.”
