When it came time for him to reach for the red marker and correct the work of his young offensive assistant, then New England Patriots quarterbacks coach Bill O’Brien opted for a joke. Despite his nickname—Teapot—O’Brien insists his default love language is a kind of ribbing humor, which prompted him to hand Brian Flores’s first few projects in New England’s QB room back with the quip: “Come on, man, I thought you graduated from Boston College?”
“We spent a lot of time together that year,” O’Brien, now, ironically, the head coach of Boston College, says about a seldom discussed but vitally important 2010 season in which Flores, now the Minnesota Vikings’ defensive coordinator, was subject to New England’s –style coach cross-training process in an offensive room for a team that won 14 games and finished first in total points. “Go break down these 100 games, all these opponents we’re going to play the following year. He had to break down, down to the blocking scheme. So after you do that for a long time, you really understand a lot about football.”
As the Vikings roll into Sunday’s winner-take-all matchup for the NFC North and NFC’s top seed—against a record-breaking Detroit Lions offense—they do so buoyed by the NFL’s best defense in terms of turnovers, second-best in terms of points per drive allowed and best in EPA per play. As evidenced by last week’s victory over the Green Bay Packers in which the Vikings completely shapeshifted into a physical man defense, showing the coverage more than they had all season and especially on third downs—after recording a season low of the coverage against the Packers a few months earlier—the reality is that there is no Flores defense that one can simply carbon copy.
According to those around the league who have watched the scheme, it is instead a fluid series of ideas that starts with the very general ethos that a good defense must crawl into the circuit box of an offense and start ripping out wires one by one. On its face, a team can generally expect split safeties and five- or six-man fronts and some kind of flourish with a defender approaching the line of scrimmage presnap, and either dropping back into coverage or adding to the pass rush. But within that simple facade is an understanding of offensive football that Flores rarely gets credit for.
This season has been a kind of magnum opus for the former Miami Dolphins head coach that has put him back at the top of many prospective head coaching lists at a time that this particular skill set is coming to light as a prerequisite for the modern candidate. Last year, for example, Mike Macdonald became a head coach after building a résumé that began with the Baltimore Ravens as a coach who suggested third-down blitzes based on his study of opposing offensive tendencies. Houston Texans offensive coordinator Bobby Slowik became an integral part of the Shanahan clique by spending three seasons as a defensive assistant and another handful of seasons as a game film analyst for the football site (Kyle’s father, Mike, told Kyle that Slowik should be one of his first hires specifically because of how Slowik was able to view opposing offenses from a defensive perspective). Ejiro Evero (a former San Francisco 49ers offensive assistant turned defensive coordinator) and Arthur Smith (a four-year defensive assistant turned offensive quality-control coach) are also top-coaching candidates who have developed their own personal styles based on a hybrid-learning process. While it sounds basic and elementary, the league is still largely divided between coordinators who produce a designer game plan based on attacking specific weakness of an opponent and a game plan that is largely a kind of personal signature based on what those coaches have been historically successful with (indeed, some defensive coordinators struggle to draw a play the way we are accustomed to seeing it on a white board, given that they always draw the defense first).
“His knowledge of protections and his ability to do things like, take away an opposing No. 1 receiver, he learned that here and he’s taken it to another level based on his own knowledge,” O’Brien says. “Going against certain guys in the NFL, you just knew, knew what he was doing. Baltimore. Jim Johnson in Philadelphia. Rex Ryan. When you went against those guys, they knew who you were relative to some other guy.
“If you’re getting ready to play Brian, you’re not going to see what you’re going to see on film.”
