Dave DeGuglielmo – December 3, 2019
Download PDF version
Tuesday, December 3, 2019
Offensive Line Coach Dave DeGuglielmo
(Is it too early to tell if G Michael Deiter is a long-term starter in the NFL? Can you make that assessment yet?) – “I can’t make that assessment on anybody yet because none of them have played enough football. He’s a rookie. He hasn’t played enough football, even with as much as he’s played this year. I don’t know if you can say that anybody is a long-term anything. People get injured, careers get cut short, guys’ talent drop off because of whatever. You just never know.”
(Through 12 games, what do you think you have with G Michael Deiter?) – “I have a guy who’s played left guard through 12 games. Outside of that, I think those assessments are made in the building. I don’t want to say one thing and then get a different read as I go back and re-evaluate all of the tape, good or bad. I don’t want to overextend what he’s done, or over-inflate his production or lack of production one way or another. I don’t know. It takes a while to truly get a good read of an offensive lineman. It’s a little different. You’ve got to weigh all of the pieces together.”
(Can you say anything about how you think G Michael Deiter played?) – “He’s a rookie trying to find his way in this business. It’s hard for rookies to do that. He’s had experience blocking some of the toughest guys in the business throughout the year. That’s good for anybody to have that kind of education, and hopefully it will serve him well going forward.”
(How has G Shaq Calhoun played since coming back?) – “Like I said, he’s in the growth process. He’s learning. He’s a rookie. That could mean a lot of things. Sometimes that’s a bad word, it’s a good word, it’s a lot of things. Rookie stands for a lot of things in my book. There is a lot that goes into that.”
(What does G Shaq Calhoun do well that made you all want to see him again at that spot?) – “Well, he’s quick. He can move very quickly for his size, which in this day and age, you need guys that can move. You play against really athletic defensive linemen. It’s more about the defensive people and how you can matchup with them. There are obviously some deficiencies with all of our athletes upfront. He’s no exception. He’s got some size issues and some anchor issues that he needs to work on; but he’s a hard-working guy, he studies the game, he doesn’t make mistakes that often and he’s one of those program kind of guys and you want to see if we can help develop.”
(T Julién Davenport has given up a ton of pressures last year when you weren’t with him in Houston and this year so far. What has made you guys want to continue to invest time in him with that in mind?) – “He’s young, he’s athletic, he’s a good guy, he works hard. He’s played through some injury. What can you ask for? I can’t wave a magic wand and have five Supermen out there. I’m not going to – Anthony Munoz, I’m not going to wake up and he’s going to stroll into my meeting room. We’ve got to develop the guys we have and as long as they’re willing and they’re tough, you go through the process.”
(But how can you get T Julién Davenport to cut down those pressures, because he’s…) – “Again, it’s – you’ve got to keep working on the fundamentals, the basics. That’s with everybody. He’s not the only one. Some of the pressures, he’s had his hard moments and he’s had really good moments. At the end of that game the other day, all of a sudden he was picking up the same stunts. He was moving. He wasn’t being affected by the same type of moves. It’s a process. This coaching style is different than the one he had. This system is a little different than the one he had, so how we’re asking him to do things is different than what we did there. I really didn’t assess a lot of what he did there. That line coach is a good friend of mine, but he teaches a different style than I teach, so he’s got to adapt – remember now, this guy played for a week, then went on IR. I didn’t work with him (while he was on IR), so I’ve worked with this guy for three weeks. Let’s not overdo that the guy’s been here a year. The guy’s been in the training room, so if you really want to know about his development, go ask the trainer. He’s been working with him a lot more than I have. (laughter) He’s got to go through the whole routine. He’s still learning some of the drills. He hasn’t been around. It takes a while to get into the system. He’s really – for all intents and purposes – he’s a rookie. He’s a rookie in our system. Yeah, he’s had some playing experience, but we’re putting him into a different environment here and we’re hoping he can develop and learn. He works hard. He’s got to keep working hard. That’s just the way it goes for all of them. I was standing there – Davenport wasn’t the only problem out there the other day. We had a lot of problems and we’re equally to blame, myself included. We’ve got to find a way to get guys to be in the right position and worst-case scenario, take the charge. Take the charge and take one for the team and be a speed bump, but don’t – the free runners, things like that, we can’t have them. We’ve got to work on that. That’s again, not just him. That’s all of those guys. Each one of them had a situation where they had to – they have to firm it up.”
(How has C Daniel Kilgore played when he’s been healthy this year?) – “He’s done a good job. Danny’s done a good job. He’s actually adapted to what I’m – if you say one thing about we’ve done in the last X-amount of weeks, is the middle of our pocket looks different. If you really want to examine something, examine how the middle of the pocket looks on a play-by-play basis. The issues aren’t coming right smack-dab down the middle, which allows the quarterback to work the middle a little bit more than say, when we first started this thing in Week 1. It was a jailbreak. Guys were coming in from all angles, so Danny is the key component to making sure that that middle is firm. It’s solid. Now it may seem like nothing, but when he’s uncovered and he’s working left to right, he can alter his call to assist one side or another; and we ended up doing that during the game the other day. I said, ‘Danny, let’s check the call here in terms of where you’re sliding.’ It doesn’t mean his blocker responsibility changes but how he’s setting – he may be looking left, but he’s helping right or vice versa. Because he’s a smart player and he’s done this a lot, he’s able to help keep that thing squared up, firmed up and allow ‘Fitz’ (Ryan Fitzpatrick) the ability to come underneath. That really makes the tackle’s job a little bit easier. Again, free runners are free runners. It (doesn’t) matter; but if those guys can turn a defensive end at 8/12, 9 as opposed to going to 10, 11, that’s a huge difference now. Huge difference. We’ve been able to solve a little bit of that. I’m not saying that that’s completely solved, but that’s where you begin. Nowadays in pass rush, if you ask these pass rush specialists, if you want to affect the pocket – look at the guy up the road, the Superman. If you look at the ninja, he gets affected by one thing only – pressure in the middle. When the pocket collapses, then he doesn’t have the ability to move and buy time or move to get away from the true rushers outside. That’s an issue and we’re trying to solve that problem here and we’re working. We’re not complete, but we’re making it better bit by bit in order to allow the quarterback to do what he needs to do. You’ve got to start somewhere, and that’s the foundation, is the middle of the pocket, and I think it’s been long neglected and people don’t get it, that that’s what really makes the pocket the pocket. The depth, that depth, that buffer.”
(The quarterback can work the edges, can mind himself in the edges if the pocket is clean.) – “We go over the philosophy inside-out. If you’re going to get beat, it better be out, never in. You do what you’ve got to do to make sure that you’re inside-out on your defender. Period. That might mean an extreme set to your inside. You can’t just get beat right off the bat outside, but if you’re going to fight a guy and you’re going to lose ground, it better be to your outside because that buffer zone –obviously for a quarterback, the most natural thing to do is take his forward steps up once he hits his back foot on the ground. Ba-ba-ba-boom, and then read. It isn’t as natural going side-to-side and then throwing. So we’re trying to create that little comfort zone, that little safe zone for him. If we can give him two or three yards of step-up and even better when teams rush wide. We saw that the other day a couple times where they starting rushing wide with both the tackles. Well now, even though they’re winning up the field on the edges, ‘Fitz’ (Ryan Fitzpatrick) can step up and throw the football. A good quarterback knows how to work a pocket, understands what’s being developed in a pocket, how we’re trying to create it. Every team, every system is different. Our system is designed to solidify the middle first and then the edges second; so what looks like a guy getting beat around the edge, he’s really not getting beat around the edge. It’s by design. I want him to run a guy at nine yards. As long as the middle is firm. What gets lost in a lot of the assessment of this is, in order for me to truly get the middle of my pocket firm, I have to make my tackle set a certain way to allow the guards to stay flat around their set; so if I’m restricting my tackles from getting width on a particular set based on a defensive look, that’s going have him a little slower getting to the edge. I’m going to give up one thing to get another thing, so I’ll give up the yard and a half on the back end of the pocket in order to gain a yard and a half on the front end, because that’s what the quarterback’s looking at. He’s not stepping back, he’s stepping up, so I need it there, not there. I ask those tackles to stay within the framework of that interior pocket for a split second before they start to expand. Once they expand, there’s a bunch of other things they have to hit on. Like number one, they have to expand…”
(So you don’t them to take a wide set?) – “I don’t want them out there because if you go out there, there’s a lot of things that can go wrong out there. Everybody has their philosophy. ‘I’m going to engage quickly or I’m going to do this.’ Listen, you need to be inside-out. You need to be square. That’s first and foremost. In my opinion, the wider the defensive end is, the deeper you kick. It’s not vice versa – the tighter he is, the flatter you kick. If he’s right on my shoulder, I don’t need to get depth. I just set to him. If he’s got width, I go vertical because all I’m trying to do is get on the line between the end and the quarterback, but the line doesn’t change. It just follows with him, so get back here. He’s got to get to me. I don’t have to get to him. His goal is back here in the pocket, so again, I’m requiring the tackles to help the interior so that the interior can then set the base of the pocket, so the quarterback buys the time. Again it’s kind of reverse thinking, but the whole idea of getting the middle of the pocket firm is to allow those guys who are lesser athletes – the defense is going to play wide three-techniques. How does a guy as a guard get all the way out to a wide three-technique without kicking for depth? He does it because the tackle’s protecting him on his set so that he has time to be flatter to engage firmer on the line. Now, we set the line of scrimmage a lot deeper and it allows the quarterback to do his thing. You’ve got to give up one thing for another, and that’s how I teach the tackles. I thought Jesse Davis had as good a game as I’ve seen him play last week. He had one or two snaps that weren’t good, but he literally looked for the first time, looked like a legitimate big-time NFL right tackle last week. (It’s the) first time. He’s been progressing to that, and he’ll keep getting better and better and he may have his ups and his downs, but for the first time he set to protect the young kid inside. He expanded. He got width. When 55, when (Eagles DE Brandon) Graham was on the edge – (Graham) got him on the first play. He bull-rushed him. After that, Graham started moving around to different spots because that wasn’t happening, so then he started attacking on the inside. He has the ability to move around to different places, so if he’s going to pick, he didn’t pick 77 (Davis). He realized that was useless, so he started finding other spots to do his work, which is – when you look at it, when you recognize it, that’s pretty impressive when a guy like Graham goes away and goes to a different spot.”
(When you look at this offensive line, are there prototypes at center, guard and tackle and how do you go about that – free agents or rookies?) – “You need good players. Smart, tough, guys that can move. I don’t know what to tell you. I love them all. 6’5, 320, run a 4.7. Yeah, that’d be great. Where do you find them? How do you get them? That’s what you’ve got to have – smart, tough and guys that can move. That’s plain and simple. If they can think and speak, they can move. You might be able to get a guy a little stronger. You might be able to put a little weight on the guy, but there are certain things that you need.”
(Size over athleticism or…?) – “Absolutely not. Athleticism is first. This is the National Football League. The days of the big, slow athlete playing up front, you might be able to have one and plug them in. But you can’t have that. You’ve got to have guys that can move. You’ve got to have guys – and you don’t have to be huge to have strength and leverage and explosive power. Those are things that they don’t go hand-in-hand necessarily. Each individual is different. Each athlete is different and there’s a lot of guys out there that have some qualities and others and you’ve just got to find the right mix. You know how it goes. They’re hard to find, but you’ve also got to find guys you can develop. You can’t go out and pick them all. You can’t go out and just say, ‘hey, I want this one, this one…’ We’re not Alabama. He picks whatever he wants. That’s why he’s good every year. I mean, are you kidding me? That’s easy money doing that. (laughter) That’s why you wonder why Florida can’t win all the time. They pick whatever they want. They just leave the rest for the riff-raff to pick up. I got it. (laughter) We don’t have that option, so what you have to do is you have to get some young men in – kind of like what Iowa does. They get these guys and who the hell knows where they get them, what farm, what pig farm they pulled them off of – good kid, tough kid, smart kid – you work them, you develop them, they gain 40 pounds and next you know, they’re getting drafted in the NFL and playing 10 years.”
(Has that always been your thing or that just developed the last 10 years?) – “No, that’s the way it’s supposed to be. My thing is, I coach who they put in the room. (laughter) They put somebody in the room and I coach them and I try to get them to play well Sunday. That’s the best I can do. I’ll help them in any way I can to assess that. That’s a program-wide process, but I’m going to coach what they put in the room. If they put my daughter in the room, 11 years old, I’d put her in a three-point stance and make sure she knew who to block on a 64-protection. Period. (laughter) I don’t know what else to tell you.”
