Nothing easy about Fangio’s defense - but very rewarding when players ‘get it’

Will Parks joined Ryan Edwards and Ben Allbright of KOA’s Broncos Country Tonight, and he explained in the most complicated way possible - which was perfect - just what it’s like to play in Vic Fangio’s defense.

“Look, we’ve got to bracket this guy, boom. But if you can’t bracket this guy, look at the C-gap. But if he don’t throw it that way, you can’t C-gap, you gotta overlap to O-Y Counter. That’s all in one play,” Parks noted, adding that the coach isn’t about complimenting guys because “he’s just so focused on winning...he just needs to have guys out there thinking.”

But Parks, currently out with an injury and hoping to be playing by the Vikings game after the bye week, told the BCT crew this defensive scheme isn’t one that you can just learn overnight (astute readers of MHR already know that because Jeffrey Essary broke down the complexity of Fangio’s scheme last spring and has noted in recent posts some of the difficulty Parks has had in picking it up).

“This defense ... you can’t walk in today and get three calls and think it’s going to be OK,” Parks said. “We have new installs every single day. We’ve got six, seven thousand calls - and they’re all in Italian [laughs]. It’s exciting.”

Exciting and tough. Parks, who has had three new head coaches in four years in the NFL, talked about previously being able to look at a playbook and match different plays with previous regimes but just under a different name.

Not so with Fangio’s playbook.

“Yeah, we gotta sit down a little bit,” he joked.

At the same time, Parks loves it, saying that when he first looked at it, he told Justin Simmons it was perfect for them.

“‘Yeah, dawg. Oh yeah yeah yeah, J, we about to go HAM!’” Parks recalled, adding that Simmons and Derek Wolfe are really catching on with Fangio’s plan.

But Fangio is still Fangio - not handing out too many compliments to his players.

“In Vic’s eyes ain’t nothing right,” Parks laughed. “He commends us on the good plays, but you make that bad play, you’re going to hear about it the whole 24 hours.”

In fact, Parks told a story about talking to the head coach after the win on Sunday:

He went up to Fangio and said, “Good stuff out there today coach, but we’ve got to stack these [wins] now.”

Fangio looked at him and said, “Yeah,...we’ve got to damn tackle!”

The entire interview with “Philly Will” is entertaining and worth some time for his insight into the team and specifically the defense - but also one story about Brandon Allen, or “B.A.” as Parks calls him.

When the team found out Joe Flacco was out with a neck injury and Allen was getting called up, Parks said “no one was trippin.”

“We aint’ trippin, man. Go out and do your thing. And he came out and did his thing,” Parks said. “We didn’t say, ‘Ah dang, man.’ Nah, it was, ‘let’s go get a dub.’ And we got it.”