Defensive Coordinator Steve Spagnuolo
April 1, 2016
Q: Within the first hour of free agency you get some toys in the toy box?
A: Yeah, it was nice. It was like Christmas. Jerry (Reese) and his staff, Ken Sternfeld, they did a great job of identifying the guys, then being real aggressive and getting what we think are some pretty good football players. It’s exciting.
Q: Is it any more difficult for you having new members of the defensive staff?
A: I don’t know if difficult is the word—it’s a challenge. Here’s the way I always look at it, though: I think there’s a positive spin on that. I’ve always felt this way, when you bring in new ideas and opinions, I think it’s two-fold: You can gather new ideas about what other people have been doing, and I think we’ve got some great guys here. And, I think this is really important, for 17 years I’ve been basically running this defensive system. It’s always good when somebody new comes in and says, ‘Why are you calling it that’ or ‘Why are you doing this?’ Sometimes you go, ‘I’m not sure why we do that, maybe we should change the word.’ So that’s been really good, the give and take and the interaction has been great.
Q: How do you look at your defense at this point? Obviously there’s some new faces, some old ones also?
A: We lost some guys, too, so it’s the give and take. We’ve kind of been formulating that right now. You go back before free agency and you’re still doing your scheme and you’re evaluating where you’re going to go from here. It’s kind of hard to fully dive into what you’re going to be and what you’re going to install until you know what you have, so that’s starting to take shape now. With the four guys we signed in free agency, plus Jasper Brinkley being back in there, it’s starting to come together now. We have kind of steered more toward what we would become based on the people that we have now, which is important.
Q: How is that different?
A: I don’t that it will change all that much, there might be some tweaks here and there. Even though we’ve identified these guys that are coming in as new, and we think we know what they are, it’s going to take a little while in the offseason to figure out exactly how we can intertwine them with the guys that we had a year ago, and what we did scheme-wise, should we keep some things, should we get rid of things? So all that’s ongoing right now.
Q: When a team goes out in the first quick wave of free agency and commits 200 million dollars to defensive players…does it speak to how depleted things were? What kind of deck you were dealing with last year?
A: I think every season rests on its own. I think everybody around the league, all 32 teams, they look at their depth, who they have, what are the holes they’ve got to fill, what’s available. I just think we did a really good job—I’m not just saying that because of the guys that we got—but I think the way we went about it and how it all turned out. I think we did exactly what we needed to do.
Q: Do you feel you now have more chess pieces that you can use as opposed to kind of just figuring it out with all these pawns?
A: Let’s go back a year—JPP, as we all know, is a really good football player—he wasn’t here with us, didn’t have him all spring. So now we get him fully right from the beginning, that’s an advantage. We do think obviously the three guys that we got in free agency obviously give us something; whether that’s because we didn’t have it last year or we did, I’m not really here to talk about that. I’m here to talk about going forward. Again, I’m excited about the guys we got. I’m hoping, certainly, that we can put a better product of the field than we did a year ago. I think that we will. All the pieces coming together—whether it’s players or coaches—is something that we’re excited about.
He knew he was going into the season, severely out-gunned.