Kris Richard in Can't-Fail Situation at Helm of Loaded Seattle Seahawks Defense

Kris Richard just hit the coordinator lottery.

In recent years, there hasn't been a better gig for a defensive coordinator to get than the one in the Emerald City. Both Gus Bradley and Dan Quinn parlayed the job into their first shots as head coaches in Jacksonville and Atlanta, respectively.

Now it's Richard's turn to run the "Legion of Boom," and we may well be talking about the 35-year-old as a head coaching candidate in his own right in a couple of years.

Because this is a job that's near impossible to screw up.

Richard's promotion to defensive coordinator has already been met with approval from the players, according to Curtis Crabtree of Sports Radio KJR in Seattle:

And it's not hard to see why. With Quinn leaving to take the Atlanta job, the last thing the Seahawks needed was a lot of upheaval on defense. By promoting in-house, the team will keep its scheme and defensive concepts mostly intact.

Richard's connection to head coach Pete Carroll traces back over a decade, to Richard's time as a player at USC. He joined Carroll's staff at USC in 2008 and then followed Carroll to Seattle as the team's new defensive backs coach in 2010 when Carroll took the Seahawks job.

That's right. From day one, Richard has been the position coach who oversaw the NFL's best secondary—the one with the flashy nickname.

And as Richard told Doug Farrar of Sports Illustrated, that defense was constructed with a very specific set of blueprints:

"

That was a clear vision from coach from Day 1 -- that was a style we wanted to play, and there's a type of defensive back he knew was going to be able to play that style. These guys, they fit the profile. There's a profile that goes along with the style we desire. We knew the types of players we wanted to bring in, and here we are.

"

Then there's the not-so-insignificant matter of those players. The Seahawks have one of the NFL's best cornerbacks in Richard Sherman, two of the league's best safeties in Kam Chancellor and Earl Thomas, one of the NFL's best middle linebackers in Bobby Wagner and one of the league's most versatile defensive linemen in Michael Bennett.

All are in the prime of their careers.

It's the sort of personnel that have a tendency to make a coach look good, and with all due respect to Bradley and Quinn, that's essentially what's happened in Seattle over the past several years.

Year	DC	Total D	Run D	Pass D
2011	Bradley	9th	15th	11th
2012	Bradley	4th	10th	6th
2013	Quinn	1st	7th	1st
2014	Quinn	1st	3rd	1st

Most of those players entered the league under Bradley. By the time he left two years ago, they were ready to take the next step under Quinn, largely because the in-house promotion ensured continuity on that side of the ball.

Now, the Seattle defense will be run by another coach who's been there since the beginning, a coach who Sherman told Farrar is more than up to the increased responsibilities:

"

He does a great job managing, I guess, our personalities. We have a few different personalities, obviously, in that DB room and we have over the years. Kris does a great job understanding who everyone is and not coaching everyone the same, understanding how people react to different things differently. But his attention to detail and the preparation of game planning is meticulous. He goes over basically every scenario you can be put in in a game and he prepares us for that. You're rarely ever surprised going into a ballgame by a formation or a play that they're going to run.

"

Mind you, this isn't to say there aren't challenges to be overcome. Seattle may not be able to afford to retain the services of complementary players such as cornerback Byron Maxwell. After dropping to 20th in the NFL in sacks last year, the team needs to get better at rushing the passer.

However, the Seahawks faced similar problems when Quinn took the job, and everything turned out just fine.

That's because the Seahawks have mastered a simple lesson that manages to evade NFL teams all the time: If it isn't broken, don't fix it.

Gary Davenport is an NFL Analyst at Bleacher Report and a member of the Fantasy Sports Writers Association and the Pro Football Writers of America. You can follow Gary on Twitter @IDPManor.