[RunKC]

Best defense in football simplifies everything. What do ya know...

It’s what Martindale, his defensive staff, head coach John Harbaugh and Weddle set out to accomplish this offseason: Make the defense so simple and easy to communicate that they could call it on the fly, and, with numerous disguises, make it look complicated as hell.

“The biggest thing is we stripped everything down from before,” says Martindale, who took over the job in 2018 after six seasons as Baltimore’s linebackers coach.

All six seasons were spent under defensive coordinator Dean Pees, and the verbiage was extensive. It wasn’t as flexible as it needed to be once NFL teams like the Rams, Chiefs and Eagles began employing pre-snap motion on a plurality of plays and used one-word play-calls to increase tempo. It had to be streamlined, and someone smart had to run it on the field.

“We took all the different terms and simplified it,” Martindale says. “Before it was like being in Spanish class, but for some reason there's a chapter on Chinese and another chapter on French. All we did was put it all in English. We really rely on those veterans. It’s an elegant simplicity to us. We have pressure off of motion. Field and boundary.

https://amp.si.com/nfl/2019/01/03/ba...mpression=true