When the Denver Broncos fired head coach Vic Fangio following the 2021 season, they also fired their defensive play caller.
The team’s next head coach, Nathaniel Hackett, brought in Ejiro Evero — a former Fangio understudy — as Denver’s new offensive coordinator.
Some fans worried that the defense would have a slide in performance following Fangio’s departure, but that wasn’t necessarily the case. Evero’s unit played well with the third-best yards-per-play average (5.0), the sixth-fewest passing touchdowns allowed (20) and the tenth-fewest rushing yards allowed (1,866) in the NFL last year.
The Broncos are now changing play callers once again, bringing back former head coach Vance Joseph as their new defensive coordinator. Joseph will be tasked with keeping what worked and improving on what didn’t in 2022.
“It has been a very good defense for a very long time here in Denver,” Joseph said after a minicamp practice on June 14. “The challenge for me is to take what they did well last year and continue that and improve. You can always improve in certain areas.
“It’s a good group. It’s an engaged group. They want to be coached, and it’s an experienced group in the backend. It’s fun to watch those guys talk through concepts and follow my lead. It’s my job to marry the language of both systems and what they’ve done well. [Let’s] keep doing that.”
Joseph also said that he has been bouncing ideas off of defensive backs coach Christian Parker and consulting him on schemes Parker ran under Fangio.
The Broncos have had a top-12 scoring defense in four of the last five seasons, ranking 10th in 2022 (21.1), second in 2021 (18.9), eighth in 2019 (19.8) and 12th in 2018 (21.8). Now it’s up to Joseph to continue that trend and, if possible, improve on it.
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