After 33 years of coaching, Chuck Pagano sat out last season for the first time. He got so bored, he said, that he took clean shirts in for dry cleaning just to have something to do. He rode his Peloton bike three or four times a day.
It’s with that perspective that he called his return to football — as the Bears’ defensive coordinator — “the opportunity of a lifetime.” It helps, too, that he’s inheriting the NFL’s best defense.
‘I feel like the luckiest man in the world at this point,” he said in his introductory press conference Thursday.
He will continue to run the Bears’ 3-4 scheme under a teaching philosophy he called “K.I.L.L. — Keep It Likable & Learnable.”
“We’re not going to try to jam a square peg into round holes,” he said. “There is a ton of talent here. They’ve built one heck of a roster. They’ve built one heck of a roster on defense. There’s impact players at all three levels. So we’ll always like everybody do the best that we can to put them in the best possible position to be successful and play to their strengths.”
Pagano said he’ll merge his own philosophy — and terminology — with the one that Vic Fangio taught the Bears the last four seasons. What his new pupils know was Cover 9 might be better known to the coach as Cover 3. The Bears, he said, will work through those discrepancies. Pagano said he’s willing to change, rather than having his entire team do it.
“I’d rather put a lot of it on me instead of 53 guys,” he said. “Every team’s different, every year’s different. The roster will change a little bit. But 90 percent of those guys are going to be back, so if I can put it on myself and [outside linebackers coach Ted Monachino] being new, those kind of things and learn that and make it easier on them and harder on me, I’ll do that. …
“They did, obviously, a lot of good things here when you look at the rankings, and you go up and down those rankings, there’s a lot of 1’s. There’s a couple 2’s, a couple 3’s. So the standard is the standard. They’ve been playing great defense here for a long, long time. Last year was no exception. So again, for us to just throw everything out and start anew, that would not be very smart on my part.”
Pagano said he was “close” to filling out his staff — the Bears need an inside linebackers coach and an assistant defensive backs coach — and that it should happen in the next few days.
