Josh Boyer – November 5, 2019
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Tuesday, November 5, 2019
Defensive Pass Game Coordinator/Cornerbacks Coach Josh Boyer
(How did you go from South Dakota to New England?) – “It probably started, I would say my coaching career all began with my father who’s still coaching high school football to this day. He’s 40-plus years into it. I got done with college, had to make a decision. I was either going to go into medical school or I was going to get into coaching. I decided to get into coaching and took an internship out in Pennsylvania which took me from Pennsylvania – Wilkes Barre – it was King’s College. (It was) a small Division III school. I think I made $3,000 a year. It was tough to make a truck payment meet. Then I went to the University of Dayton as a graduate assistant. I had an opportunity to meet Dean Pees, who was at the time the head coach at Kent State. I went from the University of Dayton to Kent State, worked for Dean Pees and then really worked in the secondary for Dean while he was there. I had a great mentor there – Mike Drake – who got Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma while we were there, ended up passing away a year later. Dean moved on to New England and I moved out to Rhode Island to coach with a friend of Mike Drake’s and from there went to South Dakota with a guy that was on staff with us at Kent State. When Dean got the defensive coordinator job at New England, he called me and they brought me in and I thought I was going in for an interview and I took like a day’s worth of stuff with me, and I ended up staying there two weeks just working. I didn’t even know if I had job, just working and then Bill (Belichick) told me when the Combine – he said, ‘go get your stuff and come back.’ So that’s how that kind of worked. Again, to me, it’s never been about money. I’ve coached at every level. It’s never been about money. It’s never been about anything other than coaching and just the love of doing it and I’ve never tried to ‘network’ like people call it. I’ve just tried to do a good job at the job I’ve had and really have only really had to interview for my first job and after that it’s kind of progressed that way. All I ever wanted to be was a high school football coach just like my dad. That’s what I wanted to do and what I wanted to be, but this has kind of taken me on a little bit different path.”
(Where does your dad live now?) – “He lives in Ohio, just outside of Columbus.”
(CB Cordrea Tankersley – where is he in his return back?) – “He’s been out at practice the last couple weeks. He’s working hard to get back like all of our guys. The one thing that I would say about this group of guys is the work ethic is phenomenal. The ability to get guys in routines, that’s taken a little bit of time, but I think guys are getting it. They’re getting the big picture. Corner is not an easy position to just throw you back out there and say, ‘okay, it’s football’ and go. There’s a lot of film study. There’s a lot of footwork. There’s a lot of just, you’ve got to make a cut this way, you’ve got to make a cut that way. He’s working hard to do that and we’ll see where that ends up.”
(I know CB Cordrea Tankersley working scout team now. How long is it going to take him to learn the intricacies of your defense?) – “I think the ins and outs of it and what you can do – ultimately as a coach what you’re trying to do is put the guys in the best position to succeed. Like Ryan Lewis has been with us for three weeks. Xavier Crawford, three days. Ken Crawley, three days. I think you can get them ready to play and you kind of limit their role because Crawford, Crawley – they both played for us last week. I think for Cordrea, it’s more of getting back into football playing shape than anything.”
(Other than young, how would you describe your current corps of cornerbacks who are on the active roster?) – “I would say that they have a great work ethic. They’ve got good – obviously the guys that we just got here, we’ll continue to work with those. The guys that have been here, I would say that the key values that we stress are they’re mentally and physically tough, they will tackle and obviously when we have success on the field, you can probably correlate that to tackles, missed tackles, the better we tackle. They’re diligent workers. As a coach, you can’t ask for much more. Whatever it is from week whatever to week whatever; it doesn’t matter – win, lose – our process doesn’t change. Our goals are to get better each day. We’re trying to get better – tomorrow, we’ll come in and we’ll try to be better tomorrow than what we were when we were on the field Sunday. That will continue as we progress.”
(How challenging has it been to mix and match all the moving parts, a lot of comings and goings?) – “Again, I think it comes down to you just try to put guys in position to succeed. Sometimes there’s favorable matchups. There’s favorable coverages or there are certain things that we’ll ask them to do, and there’s a learning process in that, too. Like sometimes okay, they do something well. Then you ask them to do a little bit more and well, that wasn’t that good. Okay, so let’s not ask them to do that, or that was good. Well maybe we can add a little bit more. You’re always kind of trying to find out. I think you just try to put them in a position to succeed. Over the years, I’d say a familiarity with the league, with the receivers, the matchups and things that we’ve been able to do and our guys have adapted very well to that and that’s a credit to them.”
(How pleased have you been with CB Nik Needham as an undrafted kid coming in and playing competently?) – “I would say the thing with Nik, and again this goes for all of our guys, it goes back to the improvement every day. I would say we’ve made some strides from where we were in the preseason to him being on the practice to him actually being on the roster and getting to play. Again, the guys that make the most out of their opportunities are going to get more opportunities and again, it goes back to Nik being an extremely hard worker. He’s lost like 12 pounds since he’s been here. He’s re-shaped his body. He’s gained some muscle mass. He’s worked really hard at it. That stuff doesn’t come easy. I wish it did. I probably need to do some of that myself. (laughter) I’m happy with way he’s working and again, we’re going to keep striving and pushing to improve that each and every day.”
(Are there good instincts with CB Nik Needham? What’s the NFL trait that you all liked back in May?) – “I think if you watch his UTEP tape, he’s an instinctive player. He had a good play style. It was just a matter of assimilating those skillsets into our system. It’s like – our system isn’t for everybody. It’s probably no different than if you’re working for Coke, maybe somebody doesn’t succeed at Coke and then they go to Pepsi and all of a sudden they’re a great executive. I think he had the things like the mental, the physical toughness. I think he had all of those things. I think he was instinctive on film. I think it was just a matter of assimilating to the program and kind of taking his abilities and his mental capacity for the game to another level.”
(When a kid shows up on Monday or Tuesday and you’ve got to get him ready for Sunday, do you live with him for four days? Does he ever not see you? What’s the process like?) – “We as a staff, we spend quite a bit of time with him and we have some good guys that are younger on our staff like (Quality Control) Charles Burks. He’ll spend some time with our DBs, getting them caught on just general information stuff. Then really what you try to do is you try to limit, just get him ready for the specific role that they’d be in that week and then all the other stuff you try to carry over as it…”
(Can you put yourself in their position?) – “Yeah. Again, I think sometimes as a coach you lean on experience and I’ve had to over the years, there was probably a month period where I was getting a new guy ready to play every week. Sometimes it was…”
(Here or in New England?) – “In New England. There are other times that you’re asking guys that are playing on offense to play on defense, so I think again it comes down to the players working hard, giving them credit for putting in time because it’s not like they just show up and they practice and they play the game. These guys, they actually put in a good day’s work…”
(A good week’s work) – “Yeah, no question. A good day’s work each day to get caught up. Their work ethic and I thought Xavier Crawford and Ken Crawley, they did a good job last week. Both of them, they played a handful of snaps for us in the game and they were good on their assignments. Again, we’ll try to give a guy a couple opportunities and if they do well with that, you just try to give them more opportunities.”
(Head Coach Brian Flores said that he was proud of the staff for all the time that they put in to try to find any small edge, any advantage. He said that after the game. I know every staff works hard and every staff puts in the hours, but the first question I have is what have you learned about the best way to find even the smallest advantage when preparing for an opponent?) – “I think the key is that preparation never stops all the way up to the game. You can always – sometimes you look at things and you go, ‘okay, well this is kind of what this team was doing a year go.’ Then you watch it a second time and be like, ‘okay, well that’s kind of confirmed that.’ Then you watch it a third time. You really get into the players and what they’re doing and specific things. You watch it a fourth time and fifth and a sixth time; those things kind of show up or you’ll be like, ‘okay, this coordinator was this team at such-and-such year’ or ‘this coordinator does this vs. our system.’ It’s just how far you go down the rabbit hole which I think all of us as assistant coaches do. We get pretty far down into it and then you have to be careful of you don’t want to overload with information. You’ve got to get pertinent information to the players based on what the game plan is. I think that’s kind of a key. It might look complex to the opponents, but hopefully it’s very simple for what we’re asking the players to do.”
(When it comes to helping an individual player helping him reach his potential, no matter what it may be – Pro Bowl, average NFL players, whatever his maximum is – what do you believe is one or two of the most important keys to approaching that as a coach?) – “The first thing I would say is I think that’s the No. 1 principle of coaching. You’re trying to get the best out of each individual, and I would say each individual is not the same, so you can’t coach them all the same. What may work for one guy may not work for another. At the end of the day, it’s beneficial to the organization (and) to the player if you’re getting the best out of that player, and I think the fundamentals of coaching and teaching all start with ‘we need to make this player the best version of himself as he possibly can be.’ I think there’s a lot of ins and outs that go into that. It’s not a perfect process either. I think some of it is trial and error, and some of it is you build a little bit of adversity in and see how they handle that because at the end of the day, when we have a smart, mentally, physically tough team, we’re going to be competitive on a week-to-week basis.”’
(I like research. If I was going to write a story about you I’d go on that Nexus website where they just have every article that’s ever been written about you and I’d read all 50 and I’d fill a page with notes and you’d be impressed at how much research I had done. Maybe we’ll do that one day. Do you enjoy the research part of all that stuff you talked about? Do you actually enjoy that?) – “I feel very fortunate and very blessed that coaching is actually a career, especially in football, a sport that I love. I enjoy most aspects of our job. I love the game-planning. I love the film study. I love the interaction with the players. From time to time, I enjoy the adversity, the confrontations, because that only builds strength. I’m just trying to think if there’s any busy work – sometimes I think to myself, ‘oh okay, I’ve got to do this paperwork.’ We have a great support staff here, so the HR, they’ve done a lot of that stuff that usually is stuff that I don’t enjoy or that my wife does a much better job at that than I do; but as far as coaching, I’m glad that we live in a great country that I would say our population supports sports and it’s awesome that I can have a job doing sports. It’s great. It’s awesome.”
