Inside NFL Head-Coaching Candidate Staley's JMU Stint

They expected Brandon Staley to capitalize on a pro football opportunity if he ever earned one.

That’s the commonality a few former James Madison players settled on when recalling the lone season spent in Harrisonburg by Staley – the current Los Angeles Rams defensive coordinator who has been tabbed as the up-and-coming darling on the NFL’s coaching carousel this winter.

The Los Angeles Chargers and the New York Jets have already reportedly, according to the Los Angeles Times and ESPN, requested to interview Staley about their respective head-coaching vacancies.

“He used to always say things like, ‘I wish this was the NFL and I wish we could coach you all day,’” ex-Dukes linebacker and current Emory & Henry defensive line coach Kyre Hawkins said. “And when he would say things like that, I always thought that he would end up in the NFL. I always knew he’d be a big-time coach, so I’m not surprised by this at all.”

Staley, now 38, was part of past Madison coach Everett Withers’ initial staff at JMU in 2014, serving as the defensive coordinator and linebackers coach.

Since then, Hawkins and Staley have stayed in contact, Hawkins said, as Staley climbed from leaving the Dukes to go back to Division III John Carroll in Cleveland – where he was prior to JMU – to outside linebackers coach with the Chicago Bears and then the Denver Broncos eventually to the coordinator gig he landed for this season with the Rams.

Los Angeles, which plays at Seattle on Saturday as part of Wild Card Weekend, finished the regular season atop the league for total defense (281.9 yards allowed per game), pass defense (190.7 yards allowed per game) and scoring defense (18.5 points allowed per game).

“I can tell he hasn’t changed his philosophy too much,” said Sage Harold, a senior defensive lineman with the Dukes in 2014. He had his most productive campaign under Staley’s watch and racked up 73 tackles to go along with 13.5 sacks that year, which led to stints in the NFL with Kansas City and Washington the following fall.

“[Staley] is the same guy,” Harold said of observing what he can when he watches the Rams. “And it’s easy to play for a guy like that, so it isn’t a shock that he’s thriving as a defensive coordinator. He played quarterback, too, so he knows and he can give the guys a perspective that most defensive coordinators cannot. And that just makes everything easier, and when guys understand what he’s trying to do and where he’s coming from, they’re going to ball out.”

But attempting to decipher exactly what Staley was teaching is one of the reasons why he probably wished he could have stayed all day on the field and in meetings as if it were the NFL while he was with the Dukes.

“He was one of the smartest IQ football coaches ever to come around us,” Jordan Brown, an All-American safety a few years later, said of his time as a redshirt freshman playing for Staley.

“It was kind of before everybody’s time with the play calls and the different checks with his defense,” Brown said. “It got to a point where he was dealing with mostly freshmen and sophomores and then you had just a couple of seniors coming off of playing in Mickey Mattthews’ defense, which was very simple. So it got complicated to a point where we were like, ‘It’s too much. We’re thinking way too much.’ But it was a wild defense to run, and nonetheless if we made the checks and balances, the opposing offense wasn’t going anywhere.”

JMU wasn’t awful defensively that year. The Dukes were 11th in FCS for takeaways with 28 total and 13th nationally for sacks while averaging 2.9 per game, but they gave up 29 points per contest, too.

Hawkins said the inconsistencies were as simple as some players understanding the system and others not being able to.

“Guys had to be on the same level as him, mentally,” Hawkins said, “as far as working to study the game, because he did throw a lot of different twists at us and a lot of different terminologies and adjustments and things like that. He kept you on your toes, but it kept our opponents on their toes, too. But it could be confusing at times for some other players, but I was a guy who grasped it a little better than the rest of the defense at the time and the guys who got it like me, Jimmy Moreland, Dean Marlowe and Sage Harold, we were spectacular within the defense and it showed.”

Hawkins led JMU with 97 tackles that fall. Marlowe and Moreland, like Staley will be part of the NFL’s postseason beginning Saturday as Marlowe is a safety and special teamer for the Buffalo Bills and Moreland is a cornerback and special teamer for the Washington Football Team. Staley recruited Moreland and Hawkins says, “without Coach Staley, we would’ve never met Jimmy Moreland at JMU.”

Moreland left the school as its all-time leader in career interceptions with 18.

Marlowe had 96 tackles and four interceptions in 2014 and Moreland, as a first-year freshman then, notched three interceptions.

“So I actually struggled as an academic freshman, the prior year before Coach Staley got to JMU,” Hawkins said. “But I remember him telling me in one of those first conversations that I could never play football for him if I didn’t handle my business in everyday life. And after talking with him about that, he pushed me and taught me things I thought I never would see in myself.”

The two created a bond and trust that Hawkins believes catapulted him to success and to comprehend exactly what Staley wanted from him.

“I was a young guy – a redshirt freshman – starting at linebacker and he promoted me to that position,” Hawkins said. “[Staley] sat me down, talked to me and said he needed me to step up. He said he had faith in me and could turn me into a player that could help not only him, but our team and our defense. He helped me a lot and we spent a lot of one-on-one time together and we used to watch film after practice all the time. Spent a lot of extra hours with him.”

The three ex-Dukes defenders – Brown, Harold and Hawkins – said Staley is a player’s coach and has the personality to handle an NFL gig. Brown said he thinks Staley could fit the mold of other young coaches in the league, like Rams coach Sean McVay, 34, or Arizona Cardinals coach Kliff Kingsbury, 41.

“Knowing where he was coming from when he got to JMU, I didn’t think it would happen so soon,” Harold said. “But I definitely knew he was pushing to go that route. I knew that, and Coach Staley always had a swagger about him like he was always here to get something done and be productive.”

Said Brown: “He was high energy, high motor. If you messed up on the play, which a lot of us did, as long as you were busting your butt and running to the ball that’s all he really cared about. And he always said, ‘If you stay ready, you never have to get ready.’ … And he’d always try to pump us up, so in a Monday meeting he was the same as on a Friday night as far as energy and everybody loved it. He kept the spirits high and it was fun to play for him.”