INDIANAPOLIS – It could be Chuck Pagano talking inside of a ballroom at the Boca Raton Resort in Florida.
Or Ted Monachino inside the media room at the Indiana Farm Bureau Football Center.
No matter the month of the offseason, or the miles separating the two Colts coaches, the defensive message in 2016 is quite consistent.
Pagano: "We want to be multiple. We want to be simple-me, complex-you. We always want to be aggressive, we want to be attacking, we want to be sound. When you turn the film on, the hallmark of a great defense is a great tackling defense and we want to be a great tackling defense and accentuate, put a premium on fundamentals and technique and communication. Hopefully when our opponent turns on the film next season and they start to study us next season it looks like we've got 12, 13, 14 players out there with guys running around with their hair on fire wrecking havoc."
Monachino: "You should be able to expect simple and sound, you should be able to expect fast and physical, you should be able to expect that all of our guys are going to do what they do best most often, and you're going to see that we play together really well. We have tried to clean up some things and take some of the gray out of the system and make it as clean as we could so they could play fast."
Attacking. Multiple. Simplified.
That's what the Colts' defense is striving for in 2016.
Monachino's arrival to Indianapolis this offseason comes after 11 NFL seasons coaching in the defensive front seven.
The Colts hope to pair that with the naturally defensive minded Pagano, who calls himself the "assistant secondary coach" this season.
From 2010-11, Monachino and Pagano were on the Ravens' defensive staff together.
Ever since the two re-joined this past January, the new coordinator knew where priority No. 1 was at his new job.
"I'm a pressure guy," Monachino said. "I think the best pass defense is a good pass rush, and that's where we're going to begin in the system. But there's (also) enough variety that you're really not going to know who it is and from where they're coming."
That's music to the ears of Robert Mathis, who still brings a "dominant" trait to the pass rush, per Monachino.
"He's very attacking," Mathis says of Monachino. "He's going to dictate to you before you dictate to him from an offensive and defensive perspective on football."
With the Colts now more than halfway through their install period this offseason, D'Qwell Jackson is seeing what Pagano promised back in January.
Jackson, the voice of the Colts defense, is clearly on board.
"Chuck reached out to a few of us when we made the hire (saying), 'You are going to love him,'" Jackson says.
"The question was what type of defense are we going to run? 'We are going to attack. We are going to play aggressive football.' That was all that needed to be said."
2016 Organized Team Activities (OTA) - Week 6 - #1
