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How first-year coordinator Chris Shula guided Rams defense through growing pains

January 18, 2025

LOS ANGELES — Typically, in a losing locker room after a game, the Rams respond to most questions — Why weren’t you more successful in this area? What did the opponent do to take this part of the game away from you? Why didn’t this play call work? — with a simple refrain: I’ve got to look at the film. So much happens in the fog of football, players and coaches alike don’t want to make snap judgements when the tape will tell them the truth.

But following the Rams’ 37-20 loss to the Philadelphia Eagles in Week 12, the Rams defense didn’t offer up that shield. The players knew exactly what had gone wrong. They hadn’t stuck to their assignments. They had allowed offensive linemen to move them out of their run gaps, leaving large lanes through which Saquon Barkley broke a franchise rushing record.

“It was a wakeup call, simple as that,” outside linebacker Jared Verse reflected eight weeks later. “We were doing the work, we just weren’t holding each other accountable. We started getting complacent. We can’t ever get that again.”

Now, headed into a divisional round rematch with the second-seeded Eagles, the fourth-seeded Rams have become a more disciplined team on defense, resulting in five straight wins and a division title. They’ve held five of their last seven opponents to 14 or fewer points.

And that renaissance began in the week of practice after that loss to the Eagles.

Steady presence

Rams defensive coordinator Chris Shula used to introduce himself only by his first name. He did not want to be associated with the other famous coaches in his family, preferring to avoid any whiff of nepotism as he built his career.

By the time Rams head coach Sean McVay promoted Shula to coordinator last winter after spending seven seasons coaching all three levels of the defense, he was more comfortable embracing his lineage. And during OTAs in the spring, former Cowboys coach Jason Garrett advised him to stay comfortable in who he is.

“He stopped me in the hallway and just said, ‘Hey, Sean hired you to be you. Don’t try to be anybody else and be the best version of yourself,’” Shula said. “That’s what I keep trying to tell myself. Just be the best version of me. Sean entrusted me with the job, do the best job you can and don’t try to be anybody else.”

Shula is not the fiery or gregarious type like the man he replaced, Raheem Morris. It can be a strain to hear him during outdoor press conferences in windy Woodland Hills.

But he is talented at building relationships with his players, like Morris was. Shula is known to keep his finger on the pulse of all the position rooms.

“He’s a guy that he kind of makes sure that everybody’s on the right page, he’s going to come into different meeting rooms and put his face in there,” defensive tackle Kobie Turner said. “I think that we all already had a respect for Shu but he’s definitely earned every bit of that respect, too, just in the way that he goes about his business, even in the game planning and the positions that he puts us in. It’s easy to go play for a defensive coordinator like that.”

One thing Shula learned early on with this season’s team is that they don’t need him to chew them out after a bad performance. They have enough internal motivation that he doesn’t have to yell.

So when they reconvened to watch film the day after the Eagles loss, Shula kept his message simple.

“I always say, ‘Just stick your face in the fan, make the corrections that we need to do moving forward and let’s do it as coaches and players,’” Shula said. “That’s all you do. Just correct it, move forward and hopefully you play better next week.”

“He just told us, ‘You can’t let that happen. You gotta stop the run, that can’t be something that ever happens again,’” Verse recalled. “No team can feel comfortable running the ball on us.”

And it was that kind of communication, the ability to know what his players needed to hear and when they needed to hear it, that led McVay to trust his former college roommate with the defensive coordinator job.

“I think when he ended up getting the job, because of how close we are relationship-wise, people just assumed that’s why. Those that have been around him and those that understand his body of work, they know that this has been earned,” McVay said. “The best coaches get the most out of guys and they make them inspired to want to try to play for Chris and for the right reasons. I think he’s done an excellent job of bringing that to life.”

Accountable in everything

Early in the season, the Rams’ defense might have seemed a little vanilla, particularly with the array of pass rushers available at Shula’s disposal. Part of it was that the entire playbook hadn’t been installed yet, but players hadn’t yet earned Shula’s trust to cut them loose, either.

“If we’re not able to hold the quarterback and keep him within the pocket and affect him with sending however many we’re sending, then we’re not going to have the ability to call that,” Turner said. “As the year has gone on, I think we’ve had more accountability and I think that’s been part of the reason he’s been able to call a lot of the things, be able to heat them up.”

“Accountability” was a big word for the Rams defense in the wake of that first Eagles game. The players took it on themselves to correct each other for lapses in effort or judgment during practices.

If a player got a sack against the scout team and coaches spotted the ball 20 yards downfield to keep the period going, that player was expected to run back to the line of scrimmage and prepare for the next play.

“If I don’t get to the ball, [Michael] Hoecht’s going to tell me. If Kobie doesn’t run to the ball, I’m going to tell him,” Verse said. “If [Braden] Fiske doesn’t run to the ball, Kobie’s going to tell him. It’s just a constant thing.”

With the trust earned, Shula has been able to open up the playbook, and pull out some heat-check calls, like the zero high safety blitz he called in the final seconds against the Arizona Cardinals that led to an Ahkello Witherspoon interception.

That culminated in last week’s nine-sack performance against the Vikings, tying the playoff record for most sacks in a game, with cornerbacks Witherspoon and Cobie Durant joining in the fun on corner blitzes.

“When we get them in second-and-12, 13, plus, he brings out the third-down package, I’m like, ‘Aw, [expletive], yeah, he’s ready to show them,’” Verse said. “He’s ready for us to come out there.”

Now, the Rams go to Philadelphia, to play the team that scared their defense straight, a measuring stick with a trip to the NFC title game on the line.

“There are going to be some ups and downs, just stay steady through it and play together,” Shula said. “You just have to play consistent and good football. Obviously, they’re a great team and they cause it all, but some of the stuff we have to play better, play better techniques and we can coach a lot better as well. The first step in correcting anything is just understanding what the issue was and the guys understanding that is a big step.”

Orange County Register

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How first-year coordinator Chris Shula guided Rams defense through growing pains

Steady presence

Accountable in everything

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