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Coaching Staff Staying A Step Ahead
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| Bob Sanders, Lionel Washington and Carl Hairston |
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by Mike Spofford, Packers.com
posted 03/06/2007
It's a new and different off-season for the Green Bay Packers coaching staff.
Now that they've been together for essentially a full year, the coaches don't have any less work to do. But the responsibilities have changed from a year ago to the extent that their focus has shifted from the building and installation of 2006 to the potential progress and improvement in 2007, providing a palpable upbeat nature to the upcoming off-season program and college draft.
"We didn't do scheme evaluations last year of how we performed, analyzing plays and things of that nature, because we were building a playbook," offensive line coach James Campen said. "Now it's fun to be able to evaluate your own guys and see them working within an offense. Instead of speculating on a lot of people, we can see the offense, how it works, and how to make corrections."
The same goes for the defense, which has gone through the same thorough scheme evaluation. And whereas last year a playbook was being developed by defensive coordinator Bob Sanders and his staff based on the scheme of Sanders' mentor, Jim Bates, this year there's a more established foundation for how everything will work.
Having that foundation in place also has the staff focused on continuing the success experienced at the end of the 2006 season, when the defense rose noticeably in the league rankings, rather than starting anew.
"We're miles and miles ahead," secondary coach Kurt Schottenheimer said. "That transition, that transformation if you will, took place as we went through the off-season last year, and then into the mini-camps, summer training camp, and then it continued to work and improve throughout the course of the season.
"Many of our problems (on defense) really showed up in the first six ballgames of the year, and the last 10 games we continued to make good progress in certain areas. So we want to hit the ground running and start out the way we finished up in the last four ballgames."
A fringe benefit to being a step ahead is that the coaching staff was able to devote more time to evaluating draft-eligible players prior to attending the NFL Scouting Combine in Indianapolis late last month.
Being able to coordinate film review of potential prospects before meeting them and seeing them work out was a valuable step not every coach was able to take a year ago, when the staff had been only recently assembled and faced higher pre-Combine priorities.
"When you do the interviews with the kids, you can have something to relate to them because you've seen them play," Campen said. "Maybe you just watched a game or two or three with some, and you're able to have a better conversation or dialogue with a player."
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The coaching staff does assist the personnel department with player evaluations to a degree, and nearly two months before the draft, the coaches in a sense feel armed with more knowledge than at this early stage last year.
"Our part is to evaluate and write reports on the individuals, how they would fit our scheme of defense," Sanders said. "We sit in on the meetings and answer any questions about how we feel they fit into what we're trying to get done.
"At the Combine, you get to know as many guys as you can, to see if they fit not only as a player but as a person that we'd like to have on our team. And anytime you have more information going in, it gives you a little more insight and some different questions to ask. Certainly as much information as you can get, the easier it is."
That's not to say the job as a whole is any easier. With the strong finish to 2006 have come higher external expectations for 2007, which none of the coaches are going to hide from.
But while the focus of the work is shifting somewhat, the work ethic itself is not.
"In this business you can't get comfortable I don't believe," Campen said. "The work is always going to be something, like this year it's just a trade-off doing scheme evaluation versus the playbook.
"There's a flow to what we're doing and you have to work harder than the year before, that's for sure." |
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