Vic Fangio – November 16, 2023
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Thursday, November 16, 2023
Defensive Coordinator Vic Fangio
(Is your thinking right now to stick with CB Kader Kohou as your nickel or have you given much thought opening the competition with CB Nik Needham? Obviously he’s a guy who’s done that before your arrival.) – “Yeah, right now we’re sticking with Kader.”
(And he’s played how do you think?) – “I think he’s played good.”
(What’s your thoughts on Hard Knocks in the building?) – “It hasn’t had any effect on me yet. They haven’t inconvenienced me or been in my meetings yet. It really hasn’t done anything for me yet. I’m sure it will at some time.”
(Have you had them before?) – “No, I never have.”
(One game of CBs Jalen Ramsey and Xavien Howard together. What was your review on that?) – “Yeah, I thought they both played good. I still think Jalen is going to keep improving. He had such a long period of inactivity. There was good improvement from game one to game two. We’ve talked about it, and he’s just going to keep getting better and better.”
(By my research, I’ve counted seven defensive linemen around the NFL playing 75 percent or more of their team’s defensive snaps. Two of those are DT Zach Sieler and DT Christian Wilkins. Is there any concern of them maybe having too heavy of a workload?) – “Yeah, at times there is. A lot of it depends on the flow of the game. We don’t have a lot of d-linemen on the active roster in comparison to other teams. They’re capable. They’ve done it in the past and they’ve done it this year so far of being able to log a lot of plays.”
(I think this is as healthy this defense has been at this point moving forward. I’m wondering about the potential for this defense. Do you think this could be the rest of the way like a top five defense in the NFL? What do you think more on those lines?) – “We just need to be as good as we can be and not really get caught up in statistics. But I do think we are headed in the right direction. As you said, we have most of our guys back now. We went through our share of the injuries early in the year. I’m optimistic moving forward.”
(What is the area of this improvement that you’ve seen that you’re most proud of defensively?) – “Just overall. We’ve just gotten better doing some of the little things at every level of the defense. When you do that, you end up getting good results. There isn’t one silver bullet that’s happened that’s made us better. It’s just kind of been a collective effort.”
(When you talk about the defense, what about the potential about this to be a game-changing, big-play defense? We’ve seen the strip sacks. We’ve seen interceptions. We’ve seen all this stuff recently. Looking ahead, is that the type of defense this will be?) – “Yeah, I mean you definitely want to be a defense that can take the ball away. We’ve had our moments as you’ve said where we’ve had some and we’ve had some dry spells too. That’s an area that we can definitely improve on. And I think we have the guys to do that.”
(With the background with free agent DT Akiem Hicks, is that a name that you’ve approached GM Chris Grier or Head Coach Mike McDaniel? Has that name come up in the building?) – “A while ago it did, but it’s never gotten any momentum.”
(What have you seen improvement wise out of your two edge guys? LBs Jaelan Phillips and Bradley Chubb.) – “Yeah, in Jaelan’s case, he missed those four games and took him a game or two to get his timing back, his feel back. I think he’s playing really good now. I think Bradley’s played good the entire season. Everyone gets caught up in numbers at times, he didn’t have ‘x’ amount of sacks early on, but he’s had some here lately. But I think he’s been playing good all year. It’s good to see for him. Happy for him. He had a tough stretch there in Denver the three years we were together. He was hurt a lot and never could get into a groove. Now I think everyone is seeing the player that he can be.”
(You mentioned the stats, the sacks, maybe not coming at first for LB Bradley Chubb. I know there’s deeper metrics and analytics that say he’s always applying pressure. Is that something you subscribe to? Do you look at those deeper analytics when you’re judging the defense?) – “No. I don’t look at the analytics part of it. I watch the tape and I know if our pass rush is good enough or not.”
(You used 15 players on defense in Germany and 13 got significant snaps. Are you trying to essentially focus on the guys who are going to play and give them a heavier workload? We’ve seen that obviously all year with DT Christian Wilkins and DT Zach Sieler.) – “Well, I think it goes back to his question there with the d-linemen. Usually, most teams will rotate the d-linemen a lot, which ups those numbers that you just alluded to. We’re low on d-linemen, so we don’t do it as much. That’s part of that. But shoot, the Raiders have a great defensive player Maxx Crosby and he never comes off the field. It never affects his effort. Guys can do it.”
(Another great Raiders player, WR Davante Adams. When you see him, you see what?) – “I see a great player. I went against him all those years when he was in Green Bay and I was in Chicago. He’s got great size, great ball skills, really good catch radius. He’s strong at the ball. Runs good routes. He’s definitely one of the top receivers in the league.”
(The Raiders are going to run the ball a lot with RB Josh Jacobs. What do you need to do to get your defense prepared for maybe the physicality of the game with a lot of runs going?) – “Yeah, we just have to come in with the right mindset. They’re going to try to run the ball, that’s what their mantra is right now and they’ve done a good job of it. Jacobs is an excellent back, one of the top backs in the league. They’re doing a good job of blocking for him, both the line and the tight ends and the fullback when he’s been available to play. It’ll be a stern test.”
(One thing that LB Jerome Baker said this week was he meets with you about obviously about communication. He said it needs to continue to get better. He said, “It’s good, but we need to continue to improve that.” Who’s the best communicator on your unit do you think?) – “I don’t know if I have that answer, but it needs to be your inside linebackers and your safeties. I think our guys our doing a good job. It’s getting better. Part of that communication too involves getting that play call in on time from my part to where they can be ready to go. Some of that is slowed down. You get teams subbing off then and you aren’t sure what’s on the field. But I think our guys are communicating better, but I agree with ‘Bake’ (Jerome Baker) it can get better even more.”
(Just out of curiosity, are you an analytics guy? Why or why not?) – “I look at it, but it’s just a piece of the equation. It’s not the end all, be all. There’s a lot of guys that give you the analytics, but they’re just reporting what they bought from some service. They didn’t actually look at the tape themselves to verify. If you sell me something, I want verification. And either you need to give me verification or I need to watch the tape and get my own verification. So I do listen to it. If there’s something interesting, I’m going to verify. I’m just not going to take that as the Gospel.”
(Sometimes coaches say they get into a self-scout on the bye since you’re not just focused on one opponent. I’m kind of curious, what is your mindset relative to we’re going to do what we do best based on personnel and/or when do you say to yourself, I’m going to break my own tendency here on this drive or this quarter?) – “I mean, you self-scout yourself every week, not just on a bye. You have to weigh all those factors you just said. What do we do best? A major factor is who we’re playing. A lot of the times, that changes things. We may have played a bunch of similar stuff in one game, now we go against another opponent and we’re playing totally different and it’s because of the opponent. It’s a factor, but you have to take everything with a grain of salt. It’s a combination of who you are, what you do best, and how do you have to play to stop the other team.”
(Kind of building on that, I’ve been talking to offensive players about how many unscouted looks they face because of the speed on this offense. Wink Martindale always blitzed. He hardly blitzed against y’all I’m told, and Bill Belicheck with the three-high safety look. How many times have you gone out of character this season and overall because of a specific opponent?) – “Not to the degree that I think you’re insinuating, but definitely you got to play what you need to play to compete with your opponent. So if that means you have to change something and do something radical, you can. We’ve never gone out and created a whole new defense. We do things different from week to week, but conceptually the players know it. We’re just getting to it a different way.”
(And when you go out of character, that’s good for the matchup as you say for the specific opponent, but you’re doing something unfamiliar. At what point that does not jive I guess?) – “Yeah, that’s a fine line you have to weigh. A lot of times you’ll be sitting there in staff meetings and you come up with a good idea or one of the coaches does, but it would be foreign to our players, and in the short amount of practice time you have, you wouldn’t be able to perfect it to the degree you want to perfect it to be comfortable. So there’s all that stuff that goes into the final decision.”
(You’re thinking well on your decision to play S DeShon Eliott virtually all snaps or all the snaps with S Jevon Holland. That said, do you have in the back of your mind a package that would take advantage of S Brandon Jones’ unique blitzing skills that he showed the year and a half prior to your arrival? Or maybe we might see that?) – “Yeah, maybe.”
