Brandon Staley's defense could give the Saints an adaptable and flexible scheme that stresses out of offenses

Kellen Moore was asked during the lead-up to the Super Bowl what type of defense he’d eventually like if he one day became a head coach.

See, every question had to be asked like that to get an answer. Moore wasn’t going to say anything that could get him or the Saints in trouble, which meant that everything had to be framed figuratively or non-specifically to get an answer. But on this one, it didn’t matter how it got asked. Moore wasn’t going into details.

“The most important thing, I think, is being an offensive guy, is what stresses you and what challenges you,” he said.

And that was it. He continued to explain that you have to evolve and adjust and be a problem solver. But when pressed to provide a little detail on the type of defense that stresses him out, Moore wouldn’t go into detail. He didn’t want to tip his hand to the Chiefs, give them anything they could use against him that weekend. But it turns out you didn’t have to look far to find the answer.

Moore checked off one of his most important tasks as the Saints’ new head coach on Friday by hiring Brandon Staley to be his defensive coordinator, a man who is familiar in more than one way. Staley was the head coach who brought Moore to Los Angeles to coach the Chargers’ offense in 2023, and cut his teeth as a young coach working alongside Vic Fangio at various stops. Fangio, as you know, famously coached the Eagles’ defense last season.

So, it appears, the type of defense that stresses Moore out is the one that he spent the last two seasons coaching against in practice.

Before he got his shot to coach the Chargers, Staley, like Moore, was considered one of the league’s brightest young minds. He was 39 when he got that opportunity, and he just never quite had enough success to meet the expectations that come when you have one of the best young quarterbacks in the league. Staley went 9-8 in his first season, 10-7 in his second, and was fired during his third year after a 5-9 start.

The biggest problem is that his defenses were never quite the strength they should have been. It allowed 27 points per game his first year, 22.6 his second, and 23.4 the third. By the end, they were fine, but not fine enough to save his job. But in 2020, when he was working as the Rams’ defensive coordinator, he had the league’s best defense, and his brilliance was on full display. Perhaps going back to a coordinator role will help him get his defenses back near the top.

There’s no doubt, though, that even when things weren’t going perfectly, Staley is a brilliant coach with some great game plans. He’s primarily versed in odd (3-4 base) defensive fronts, but can switch to even (4-3 base), and does so at times to surprise his opponents and catch them off balance.

Staley also does a great job of disguising his coverages. He likes to work with a two-man shell, which forces quarterbacks to work underneath and limits explosive plays, but he does a good job of disguising his coverages. It’s not uncommon to see his defense show two deep safeties and then rotate into a Cover 1 or Cover 3, both of which are single-high safety looks, as the ball is snapped. These things are done to try and confuse quarterbacks and put the defensive backs in position to take advantage of mistakes.

Staley likes to play with lighter boxes against the run and bring an eighth defender from somewhere deep instead of having that player in the box. So, instead of covering a single gap on the defensive line, he likes his players to cover a gap and a half. A lot of teams have their players attack one gap, and that allows players to attack a little bit more and be aggressive. That approach allows players to go out and make plays, but it also means that a run can hit somewhere directly and find a weak point.

Two-gapping used to be a thing that teams used that protected against this approach, but it is a bit out of fashion and it requires a body type upfront that is difficult to find. In the most basic terms, using a gap-and-a-half system requires players to attack one gap and then fall back and cover a second gap on the line once their original gap is no longer threatened. To put it another, more visual, way, if your primary gap is the one between the center and guard, and it is not under threat, you’d fall back and hit the one next to it. The idea is that there should never be a weak spot or something left uncovered.

The advantage to playing like this is that it not only allows you to start out with a lighter box instead of immediately dropping a safety down, which makes it a little bit harder for the offense to identify where players are coming from and bring blocking support. It changes the math a bit, so to speak, which can create advantages.

A lot of what Staley does is different from the things that have come to define this defense. He blitzed a little more than the Saints did during his tenure there. He utilized more 3-4 looks than 4-3, which is the opposite of what defined the Dennis Allen tenure. The disguising and penchant for simulated blitzes will feel similar, but the philosophy is different.

Allen liked to play a lot of man coverages. Staley is more of a pattern-match guy, which, in the simplest of terms, is a zone coverage that can convert to man depending on what the receivers do (we’ll get into this more over the offseason). Yes, it will be different.

Many of Staley’s principles on defense seem smart, and it seems like things are set up to have an answer for everything. The players have to be smart and organized and on the same page. If Staley can focus his entire energy on making sure all of these things work the way they’re supposed to work, maybe that will be the trick.

Because at the core of it, this is a defense that adjusts and solves problems and does those things in real time. If it works, that kind of defense sounds like the kind of thing that would stress out any offense.