Cowboys defensive coordinator finds teaching tools everywhere

Rod Marinelli roams the Dallas Cowboys’ practice field, ready to bark out praise for good techniques and tongue lashings for poor effort or form.

Marinelli is a high-strung, high-energy coach who brings the same amount of enthusiasm toward rather mundane football drills as he brings to games. In the off-season, though, the defensive coordinator gets away from it by taking trips with his wife.

Well, he somewhat gets away from the game. Marinelli doesn’t do much fishing or swimming on vacation, preferring to focus on learning new things and how he might apply them to football.

Every trip, it seems, has something he can relate back to football and share with his team.

He went to the Black Hills in South Dakota a couple of years ago, and became enamored with the speed and coordination Crazy Horse used in his attacks. That happened to fit perfectly with his Tampa 2 defensive scheme he runs, which relies mostly on speed.

This off-season, he took a trip to Normandy, France, and learned about the history and tactics behind D-Day during World War II. Concise communication, Marinelli found, was key in the attack.

Or, as rookie defensive end Randy Gregory explained it: “The analogy was they gave a signal to bomb the front and obviously they didn’t and everyone went in and got killed. The moral of the story is we’ve got to communicate or else.”

Learning that message reaffirmed Marinelli’s football beliefs in keeping it simple for players. In his mind, a player with 4.7 speed should be playing at 4.7 speed. Too much information and words could bog him down to the point where he plays with 5.0 speed.

“That’s the worst thing a coach can do,” Marinelli said. “When a man knows what he’s doing, he can play fast.”

It’s hard to argue with Marinelli, the 66-year-old Vietnam veteran who worked magic with the third-worst defense in league history in 2013 and turned it into a middle-of-the-road unit in 2014.

“He’s passed so much knowledge to me and to our whole defense, I’m thankful for it,” defensive tackle Tyrone Crawford said. “We’re just happy to have him as a coach.”

The defense is expected to take more strides this season under Marinelli. The Cowboys spent most of the off-season focused on upgrading the defensive side of the ball.

They spent their first-round draft pick on cornerback Byron Jones in hopes of helping a secondary that ranked seventh-worst in pass defense. And they drafted Gregory, the highly-touted defensive end out of Nebraska, as well as signing controversial defensive end Greg Hardy to boost a pass rush that raked up only 28 total sacks last season.

“The personnel looks better on paper, but the grade comes at the end of the year when you look at the won-loss record and how the defense performed,” executive vice president Stephen Jones said.

That is true, but the front office believes that Marinelli is the man who will make sure the defense performs up to expectations on the field.

Marinelli has come a long way to show that his head coaching days didn’t tell the whole story of what kind of coach he was. Going 0-16 as the head coach of the Detroit Lions in 2008 surely served as motivation for Marinelli to prove himself.

And he’s done that so far. He went to the Chicago Bears and re-established himself as a defensive guru, and has carried it over to the Cowboys.

Marinelli can look back on his Detroit days with a sense of pride, knowing he never wavered in his approach. Sure, nobody wants to go through something like that, but Marinelli came out better for it.

“That gave me an opportunity through some adverse situations to stand on what I believe, and I believed it,” Marinelli said. “You don’t want to go through it, but I look at everything I’ve done — what can I take from that experience and build on?

“I always look for positives and I always respect football. The worst thing we can do in football is bury our head to this game. I just won’t do that.”

He won’t let his players do that, either.

Marinelli demands the best out of them, and isn’t afraid to call them out when something isn’t being done up to his standards.

“The No. 1 issue in the NFL is morale,” Marinelli said. “This league, at the end of the day, is a blue-collar league. Your attitude can carry you.”

This story was originally published August 3, 2015 at 4:15 PM with the headline "Cowboys defensive coordinator finds teaching tools everywhere."