With NFL facilities around the country slowly scheduled to reopen for staff and players, coaching staffs everywhere will wrestle with the excitement of slowly being reunited with their teams, while also following stringent state and local guidelines as the country continues to battle the spread of COVID.
As Rhule explains in Peter King's recent Football Morning in America piece highlighting how Rhule and his staff are managing distance learning, drawing on his experience working with a variety of different positions over the years, Rhule is having his staff sit in on meetings outside of their position. That includes a focus spending time on the other side of the ball and on special teams as well.
“Over the years. I just felt like there was a real disconnect between how much offense the defensive coaches know, and how much defense the offensive coaches know. And so that’s just allowed me I think to be really confident as a head coach," Rhule shared in King's piece.
"I’m not some guru, but I do know enough about every position on the field. The ones I haven’t been an expert at, I’ve hired really good coaches there. I’ll learn from them. It’s my job as a head coach to have players play their best football when they play for me. You can’t ask the players to learn the full game if our coaches don’t do that. I think that all comes from my background.”
He's also leaning on his players to do some of the teaching as well, as new quarterback Teddy Bridgewater recently led an install.
Along with crosstraining, Rhule has also assigned his staff an area of expertise to present concepts and topics to the rest of the staff. Each staff member will lead a 40 minute session on topics ranging from tackling to route concepts against a certain coverage.
Head over to King's piece to read more, including some valuable insight on how offensive coordinator Joe Brady prepares his quarterbacks to perform in critical moments, starting with their prep on Saturday nights.c