Buffalo Bills DC Jim Leonhard ready to attack Houston Texans in Week 1
· Yahoo Sports
The Buffalo Bills are just a few days away from their Week 1 road game against the Houston Texans. It’s a daunting task for first-time head coach Joe Brady and first-time NFL defensive coordinator Jim Leonhard. As a franchise, the Bills haven’t won a game at NRG Stadium since 2006 — a place that frequently turns into a house of horrors for Buffalo’s fans.
But with a new coaching staff comes new opportunity, and new approaches to dealing with trouble. Houston is expected to bring plenty of the latter to Buffalo on Sunday afternoon, but you can count on the team’s new coaching staff doing anything other than backing down.
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The first week of any NFL season is rife with irregularity, and we have little to go on regarding what the Bills look like on defense under Leonhard’s guidance. That could prove advantageous, but with that comes a learning curve. So what might we expect to find out of Leonhard’s system, his defensive mantra, if you will?
Matt Bové wonder the same thing, and asked an enlightening question of Leonhard about his mindset. The one thing anyone who follows this game closely understands is that you always find Jim Leonhard and aggressive defense mentioned in the same first breath.
To that end, Bové presented the following to Leonhard:
“I’m not asking, I guess, from a schematic standpoint, but you know, we’ve heard so many people say so many times that you’re an aggressive defensive play caller. In your words, what does that mean?”
To which Leonhard explained:
“To me, that just means you’re not going to let the offense dictate the game. Right? We have to throw our punches, too. And… they’re strategic. Right? You’re doing them on purpose. I don’t like to be reckless as far as how I call a game, but I’m not just gonna sit back and say like ‘we’re just gonna out-execute you week in, week out, every situation that comes up throughout the game.‘ So, there are certain scenarios within a game that we wanna be really aggressive, and there’s others that we will consistently be a little bit more passive on. Right? And that’s the way I like to call games — and you know, we have to make an offense react to us at times. Right? Otherwise, the good offenses — if they get in a rhythm, right — sometimes it’s hard to regain the momentum. So, you have to keep offenses off rhythm, whether it’s speed him up or it’s slow him down, there’s multiple ways you can do that.”
Whether wholly revealing or not, it felt like the first time we’d heard Leonhard speak to his defensive philosophy in such a candid manner. There’s a lot to be said for his approach, as well. Certainly, it can lead to negative plays if done recklessly, but Leonhard assured all that’s not his intent. His approach instead appears to be measured aggression where an offense and its coordinators are constantly trying to adjust to absorb the next blow.
Leonhard went so far as to relate it to boxing, calling out the idea of “throwing our punches” in “strategic” fashion. Being aggressive for aggression’s sake is a losing formula, where carelessness often creeps in at the worst time. It seems pretty clear that despite his reputation for being aggressive, Leonhard isn’t going to just throw caution to the wind unless strategy calls for such a storm.
Catch up with all the latest from Jim Leonhard via the embedded video, below: