Miles
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- Mar 18, 2019
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ENGLEWOOD, Colo. — As a new head coach in 2018, Matt Nagy made meeting with Vic Fangio his first priority. In setting up his coaching staff, Nagy made sure to retain Fangio and, in the process, he retained the kind of coach he needed not only to have one of the best defenses in the league, but also to have a reliable confidant with decades of experience by his side.
That move proved to be a wise one, as Fangio guided the Bears defense to become one of the league’s best as Nagy, who has an offensive-minded background, helped develop the other side of the ball.
“The thing is when you're a first-year head coach, you come in to this and you've never been a head coach before, you're looking for guys that have experience, guys that you trust, guys that you have gone against before,” Nagy said on a conference call with Denver media Wednesday, “and he was exactly that. When I got hired, he was the first discussion [and the first] move that I made was to meet with him. So, you meet with him as a person and Vic in some ways is very introverted, but in other ways he is not. You have to know who he is and how he works, and I think once you get that part, then you'll see he's a very, very, very loyal human being that really has had a lot of success in this league.”
As the two prepare for their first meeting as head coaches, and as Fangio faces his former team, it’s clear this won’t be any sort of grudge match. In fact, Nagy views Fangio in the same light as his mentor, Chiefs head coach Andy Reid.
“Yeah, we always reference Coach Reid as a beautiful mind on offense, and I think you can easily say on defense that Vic has a beautiful mind. … He is a guy that is very, very, very intelligent football-wise. He understands the game really well. There's a lot of guys that are that way, but then when you can teach it to the kids or teach it to the players that it makes sense to them so that they can play fast — I think that is probably one his biggest strengths.”