If we’re listing the importance of coaches, head coaches are 1 and the offensive and defensive coordinators are 2A and 2B. Which one of those is 2A and 2B is dependent on the team. As I mentioned in my head coach description, sometimes a head coach will give the play-calling duties to a coordinator even if the head coach has a background in either offense or defense.
But a good rule of thumb is that if a head coach is a defensive coach, you can be sure the offensive coordinator is the one calling offensive plays and if a head coach is an offensive coach, you can be sure the defensive coordinator is the one calling defensive plays. Or if you’re Jeff Saturday, maybe you flip a coin or something, maybe high-stakes rock, paper, scissors. My point is that Jeff’s a bad HC and I’m going to take every shot at him that I can.
These coordinators are responsible for a lot. Offensive coordinators are in charge of designing plays, designing strategies, designing schemes to get players in a position to succeed, running offensive practices, and calling plays. Defensive coordinators are in charge of essentially the same things on the other side of the ball, but instead of designing schemes to get players to succeed, they’re designing game plans.
It’s all pretty common sense stuff.
Head coaches typically have experience as a coordinator of some sort. Coordinators can have a variety of experience levels, but it’s usually an ex-head coach, position group coach, or just a coordinator for a different team.
Enter Bruce Gradkowski and Donnie Abraham.
Offensive Coordinator Bruce Gradkowski:
Gradkowski was in the NFL from 2006 to 2014 and played for 5 teams. He was a backup/temporary-starting quarterback for pretty much his whole career and never got a lot of meaningful playing time due to a whole bunch of injuries. In 2017 he was a volunteer QB coach at a high school in Ohio, then in 2021, he was a head coach at a different high school in Ohio.
Not a whole lot of coaching experience, but the experience that he’s had being on different teams and working with different offensive coordinators is valuable. He has the potential to be someone who can use things that he’s seen work and things that he likes to design a good offense.
That’s pretty much it for him. There’s not a lot to go off of. He has a slight tie to St. Louis from the 3 months that he was on the Rams roster in 2008.
Defensive Coordinator Donnie Abraham:
Alright, now I like this one. Donnie has the most and highest level of coaching experience on this staff. He was a cornerback in the NFL from 1996 to 2004 for the Buccaneers and Jets and was a pro bowler in 2000. He played for some really good coaches and those coaches had a lot of good things to say about him as a player and about how smart he is.
As a player, he didn’t have a passion for coaching. We know that because he said, “I’m never going to be a coach.” You don’t have to read the tea leaves to understand where he was coming from. Now, he said that 20 years ago. I said some stuff 20 years ago that didn’t exactly pan out too. Like when I said, “Dumb and Dumberer is the peak of comedy” and “Leonard Little is a good guy”. Sometimes you’re wrong. What are you gonna do?
One coach in specific, (Herm Edwards, a journeyman head coach who is respected by a lot of people), noticed that when Abraham would ask questions about the defense, he wouldn’t just ask what to do or how to do it, but he would ask why he’s supposed to do things. That’s important when it comes to coaching because that means you’re trying to find out the reasoning; trying to find out the scheme.
Abraham has had a number of coaching jobs since his playing career ended. He spent 10 years as a high school coach. He’s been a defensive backs coach for an arena football team (which is a tough job because in arena football they throw the ball over 90% of the time, so kudos to him for taking a job where you’re gonna fail and fail and fail again), he was the defensive coordinator for the University of Illinois, and he was the defensive backs coach for a team in the AAF (a different spring football league back in 2019 that went bankrupt halfway through the season).
He’s had a reasonable amount of success and a good amount of experience.
Based on what he has done in the past, I would imagine his defense would be a defense that focuses on stopping the pass first. When he was the DB coach at Illinois, the head coach was Lovie Smith. Lovie helped develop a defense called the “Tampa 2” which, at the time was groundbreaking. It is still used as a base pass-stopping defense today because it doesn’t require players to be super athletic to be successful. In other words, it’d be a great base defense for the XFL.