For Chargers, a wake-up call
SAN DIEGO — Ron Rivera never needed an alarm clock. His Army officer dad took care of that each dawn, loudly rapping on the bedroom doors of his four groggy sons.
No matter where they were living -- Ft. Ord, Ft. Lewis, Ft. Meade, Ft. Gulick -- the daily routine never changed.
“There was no sleeping in, not on Saturdays, either,” said Rivera, defensive coordinator of the San Diego Chargers. “It’s funny, living on an Army base, how many lawn mowers start at 6:30 in the morning.”
Decades later, the recently promoted Rivera has these marching orders: Wake the slumbering Chargers defense.
Call this bugle blast Rivera’s Reveille.
It all starts today at 1315 hours -- 1:15 p.m. -- when San Diego begins the second half of its season against Kansas City, with the 3-5 Chargers looking to halt their losing slide at two games.
With a week off after their trip to London, the Chargers did something that their defense has seldom done this season: They seized the moment. They fired coordinator Ted Cottrell and replaced him with Rivera, who had been coaching the inside linebackers.
The Chargers are ranked last in the NFL in pass defense, 25th in total defense, 23rd in points allowed and are tied for 14th in sacks. Not exactly what the franchise was hoping for when it sank millions into contracts on that side of the ball.
With linebacker Shawne Merriman out because of a season-ending knee injury, the Chargers got scant pressure on opposing quarterbacks. Their blitzes were increasingly predictable and decreasingly effective.
Defense isn’t San Diego’s only problem, but it’s a big one.
Now, Rivera gets a chance to call the shots, just as he did as defensive coordinator of the NFC champion Chicago Bears in 2006. And he brings with him an almost militaristic attention to detail.
By way of example, Coach Norv Turner said he saw a heightened sense of accountability in practice this week.
“It’s a real subtle thing,” Turner said. “In a practice, you can put your hands on a guy and say to yourself, ‘I had that tackle.’ And, realistically, you weren’t in position to make a tackle. That shows up in a game.”
And it shows up time and again. The team that never yielded more than 17 points in its six-game winning streak at the end of the 2007 regular season has already given up at least 23 in five games -- including 39 in a loss to Denver and 37 in a loss to New Orleans.
That wasn’t entirely the fault of the defensive coordinator -- it seldom is -- but no one was shocked when Cottrell was shown the door.
It was more stunning that Rivera joined the Chargers’ staff last season as a mere position coach. He had been a candidate to be a head coach in several NFL cities -- San Diego among them -- and left Chicago only when his contract wasn’t extended. Although Bears Coach Lovie Smith pointed to philosophical differences with Rivera, Rivera wasn’t Smith’s first choice from the start. (Chicago’s defense hasn’t been nearly as good since Rivera left.)
To hear Rivera describe it, he had to take a step backward to move forward with his career. He had either worked or played in a wide array of defenses, as a backup middle linebacker to Mike Singletary on Buddy Ryan’s 46 defense of the championship 1985 Bears; as an assistant under legendary Philadelphia coordinator Jim Johnson, a mastermind of the blitz; and as the implementer of Smith’s “Tampa Two” system in Chicago. With the Chargers, he has his first real experience with the 3-4 defense.
All of that broadens his resume and makes him a better candidate to become a head coach.
“I think we all kind of looked at it as we were incredibly lucky to be getting that type of talent at a position coach,” Chargers defensive tackle Luis Castillo said. “We saw it as an opportunity to learn from a guy that had more to offer than just a linebacker coach.
“When he first got here, there were some guys who went to him and said, ‘Hey, what can we do better as a D-line? What did you guys do in Chicago?’. . . . When you have a guy like him, you do it and trust what he says.”
And Rivera says a lot, both on the practice field and in the video room.
“The guys will tell you I’m a little bit of a nitpicker,” he said. “I try to make a comment on everything, every play, every practice snap. I always try to give feedback. I’m meticulous about it.”
Maybe that attention to detail will pay off. Despite their disappointing start, the Chargers are just 1 1/2 games behind Denver in the AFC West.
Dawn has broken on the season’s second half, and Rivera -- along with opportunity -- is knocking away.
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