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New Orleans Saints Defensive Coordinator Gregg Williams
Media Availability
Friday, December 02, 2011

ESPN in their coverage showed a moment in the game with you celebrating with your team. What was going on?

“When you’re as hard on them as I am, you try to get into celebratory fashion with those guys and let them see a different side of you. We were doing that and just having fun celebrating a big play. We were playing very well as a team and created another short field. I have a good relationship with the offensive players and defensive players, too. One of the kids I have the greatest time with every day in practice is Jimmy Graham. What a great story he is with his background. I get way too much credit with X’s and O’s. Hopefully one of my strengths is being around people and dealing with people. The fun part of it is going back and forth with the offense too. Some of the questions a while ago as I’m just sitting there smiling and listening to it is Drew Brees, Tom Brady, and Peyton Manning are the top three guys at doing what you guys were talking about doing with the looks and being able to slow their brains down and not be overloaded with information. Most fun times we have in practice are when we do something defensively that bothers Drew. When it happens in practice, you don’t see him look at Sean Payton or Jon Vilma. He’s burning a stare right through me. Just the competitiveness back and forth of what we’re trying to do and preparing each other. Sean Payton in all the years I’ve gone against him before I got here, he’s one of the best one or two people that handle personnel packages getting on and off the field. We’re the same way defensively. We’re up to 40 packages now, but we only played 12 packages this past game. Every single day the packages change. Those guys have to get comfortable at the verbalization and the non-verbal body language. I really do believe that if you watch the difficulty of some of the defensive staffs that go against us, there’s one particular team in our division that struggles with Sean’s packages and they burn timeouts. It’s a distraction to the defense when you don’t know who’s on the field when they break the huddle. If you can cause that little bit of a distraction and we can we playing something real simple but fighting to see who’s coming on the field that cause you hesitation. I have a signal file on every single team in the league. We have advance scouts that do that type of stuff. The teams that don’t signal like us are the ones that challenge you the most defensively. We get challenges the most in practice because we don’t know what they’re getting ready to do. It helps us when we play against someone who doesn’t give signals. It’s not a distraction to our defense. Vilma is real good with it and Jo-Lonn Dunbar is real good with it. Malcolm Jenkins is real good with it. We have a coach on our sidelines that’s responsible for telling our defensive guys who they have in the huddle before they break the huddle through non-verbal communication that we’re using. When they break the huddle, we know. When you have certain personnel on the field, you’re expecting certain formations. You’re expecting certain plays. When you don’t know, and Sean and Pete do a great job with it, it causes a hesitation. When you have a guy like (Darren) Sproles that can line up anywhere, there’s another hesitation.”

Do you think this Saints offense ranks with that 1999 Rams offense when they won the Super Bowl?

“There are a lot of similarities. The best offensive player that I’ve been on the field coaching a defense against is Marshall Faulk. It’s unbelievable. In his heyday, it was unbelievable what he could do and how he went about doing it. There are some similarities here. Our speed in certain areas is not as good as they were. We handle some of the other dead spots and concepts and how they create problems for the defense similar to that ‘greatest show on turf.’”

Full interview.
Carmichael and Williams' Weekly Presser