The Larry Coyer Era Begins in Indy

eason doing pretty well but faded in the second half. Shanahan in one of his dumber moves fired Larry after the Broncos went 9-7 and failed to make the playoffs.

At this point I need to clear something up that was written on a popular Colts blog: Larry Coyer did not run a version of the Tampa-two in Denver. Larry used a four-three base, with zone blitz schemes, and man coverage (and who wouldn't if you had Champ Bailey as your corner back).

As John Lynch pointed out, there were elements of the Tampa-2 in Denver in 2006. They used a four-man line to rush the passer (unfortunately for Larry it was the Cleavland Browns line), and they had speedy, undersized linebackers. They definitely moved to a mentality of less blitzing, and everyone flying to the ball with great speed, but this is not enough to classify them as a Tampa-two defense.

After being fired by Denver, Larry was hired by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 2007 as defensive line coach/assistant head coach. In 2008, Larry was promoted to a full time assistant head coach. Jon Gruden wanted Larry to be involved not only with the defensive line/linebackers but also with the offensive line.

Gruden said at the time "I want to have Larry Coyer more involved in our football team. He still will have responsibilities around the defensive line and the linebackers. I want to use him on offense as well. His background and expertise can help us. I think it’s a great appointment for a heck of a football coach."

Larry got the experience to coach with the the mastermind of the Tampa-two: Monte Kiffin. This is where he really picked up the principles and concepts of how that system is run. No doubt he also learned from Monte about making in game adjustments to counteract what the offense was doing.

In 2007, the Bucs' defense ranked second in the league overall and in 2008 they ranked ninth. However, please keep in mind that in 2008 Monte Kiffin announced he was leaving the team at the end of the season. Unfortunately for the Bucs, Monte did this in the middle of the season. It's no surprise that the defense fell apart after that.

As you can see from above there are a lot of positive things to say about Larry's coaching career as a defensive coordinator, and the job he did in Tampa. To be fair, Larry had his faults as well.

The two biggest complaints about Larry's defenses were that sometimes they blitzed to often. The other one was that he was not good at making in-game adjustments. It has been said that once the offense figured out how Larry was attacking them, it was easy to adjust the game plan. The problem was, when the offense changed how they played the defense, he didn't counter by making defensive adjustments.

My personal opinion is that Larry has learned from the mistakes he made in Denver, and there is no question in my mind that he got a good lesson at making in game adjustments from Monte Kiffin.

Overall the stats don't lie. Larry did an outstanding job in Denver as linebacker coach and defensive coordinator. I haven't listed all of them here, but I recommend looking them up. They are pretty impressive.

In the second part of this piece I am going to give an in-depth analysis of how Larry is going to shake up Indy's defense. I know I am right since the Colts are saying he isn't going to change much. Uh, yeah, this is the same team that said Marvin Harrison was better then ever last year.

Stay tuned.

 

 

 

 

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