A revealing look at Bears' mystery man: Vic Fangio

The time is almost here for Vic Fangio's next great defensive rebuilding test, but if you really wanted to give him what he needs to succeed in Chicago, you'd lock him in that office at Halas Hall back in the spring, where all he had was a PowerPoint, some Xeroxed playbooks and around 45 expectations to shatter.

You'd do it because hope is a lingering thing these days, and in a city celebrating the 30-year anniversary of arguably the greatest defense ever, the architect of the NFL's best unit of the last four years has become the embodiment of it. Time felt limitless in those meetings, and it rarely does that in the Not For Long league. Clocks run on everything in this sport, from offensive snaps to the hours Fangio has left to do what the Bears brought him here to do: stop Aaron Rodgers and the Packers.

Those meetings were the first introduction to a coach most players just knew by pedigree: a 3-4 specialist with 27 years as an NFL assistant with four coordinator jobs, the latest featuring four straight top-five finishes in yards allowed in San Francisco. Surely, he'd scream and spit in their faces while calling exotic blitzes, like the Dick LeBeaus and Ryan brothers of the world, a product of a corporate league that is constantly regressing personalities to the mean.

The Fangio way

What they got was just different: PowerPoint presentations filled with situational football, narrowing in on tendencies as specific as the left hash of a 2nd-and-6 from the opposing 39; an introduction of his schemes with a list of ways to beat them; and a thought of the day.

For one thought of the day, Fangio listed out the letters of the alphabet with a number assigned to each one: A was 1, B was 2, etc. He showed that if you added up the numbers for the letters in "attitude," the sum would be 100. He told them attitude is the only element that is 100 percent within their control.

It was in those early meetings that Fangio met Sam Acho, one of a couple players on the entire roster with 3-4 experience after playing linebacker for the Cardinals the past three seasons.

"Arizona, huh?" Fangio said to him. "Y'all blitzed a lot."

Acho nodded.

"And I bet you gave up your share of big plays, huh?" he continued. "That's why I don't like to blitz."

In the coming weeks, Fangio would again and again emphasize the weaknesses of what he does. He told a story from one of his first pro games, when he ran through the tunnel and immediately spotted a cliché 'D-Fence' sign in the crowd. He decided then that he wanted his units to operate like a fence, strong at multiple levels, wrapping a range of grass and protecting it at all costs. He would need his players to know where the gates were and how to close them.

Defense? This all started to sound more like crisis control.

In the coming weeks, Fangio's quirky styles came out on the field. His signature outfit is a crew-neck sweatshirt with sweatpants, all gray, which he wears even when it's 90 degrees. He says little during plays and after, roaming the sidelines with a wad of tobacco in his mouth as he drums up ideas for tomorrow. When he does approach athletes, it's sometimes to tell them to try something new, mostly because he's just curious to see how it'll turn out.

Mostly, he places the onus of speech on the players, begging them to ask him questions when they don't understand. No question is a dumb one on Fangio's field, and no idea is too crazy for at least a moment's consideration. He's been known to wake up in the middle of the night with an inspiration for a call, and out of fear of forgetting it, he'll leave a voice mail at his office to listen to and evaluate later.

He's a calmer coach, players learned in time, but qualifying him is not easy. They'll debate whether you can apply a term of peace to a guy who seems mentally tortured by something as mundane as a TV timeout. Over time, they'd start to develop their own definitions.

Jared Allen called him "professor-esque." Ego Ferguson said he's "a wizard at football." John Timu said, "If a football game was just the defensive coordinator's mindset, then I think he'd be undefeated."

The labels are extensions of the ones from his different stops. His persona was perhaps most startling to players in his one year in college with Stanford in 2010, when he was exposed to college trademarks like hurry-up spread offenses and end-over sets, which just created more vessels to experiment. Even at a school known for academics, players coined him "Lord Fangio." Richard Sherman said he was a "stone-cold killer," and Shayne Skov called him an "evil genius."

Stanford was where he began his good cop-bad cop partnership with Jim Harbaugh, who is as explosive as Fangio is methodical. Owen Marecic, who played linebacker and fullback at Stanford and later fullback for a summer with the 49ers, recalled how practices became a battle of wills between the two. A defender would burst through the line for a sack, meeting a fury from Harbaugh over risking an injury, which sparked a random outburst from Fangio, who celebrated the player's tenacity.

"We knew that Vic had our backs as players," Marecic said. " … I think it directly contributed to the fierceness we played with."

The challenge here

In Chicago, the outlook isn't currently so bright. On Sunday, the Bears will face the NFL's reigning MVP in Rodgers with a first-time safety in Adrian Amos and a thin defensive line missing the one player Fangio labeled as a sure thing this summer in Jeremiah Ratliff, who is facing a three-game suspension.

This preseason, players received literature that made sure they were well-versed in what they were during last year's 5-11 campaign: 30th in defense, including 30th against the pass.

"It's a challenge," Fangio said of rebuilding this defense. "Obviously, they've been pretty bad here for two straight years defensively."

What strides, if any, come in Fangio's first year in a new unit will soon be learned, but some players admitted to feeling the difference over last year's staff. Ferguson admitted to playing last year without much understanding of the opposing offense. Before he went on injured reserve, Ryan Mundy lauded Fangio's long-touted coverage disguises, something he said wasn't here much last season. And before he was cut, cornerback Tim Jennings didn't hesitate for a moment when asked what Fangio brings that's new to the defense: "Strategy."

Even under a defensive-minded head coach like John Fox, the keys to the defense are mostly Fangio's.

"I don't think I was going to hire Vic and say, 'OK, we're running the 4-3,'" said Fox, who has run the 4-3 for a majority of his 13 years as a head coach. "You've got to let a guy do what he's accustomed to doing and in many cases how."

The Bears are placing a degree of faith in Fangio, which in the NFL can either wildly succeed or blow up in their face.

It's already bitten them once so far, back when Fangio urged the Bears to sign his former 49ers defensive end, Ray McDonald, who previously had two domestic violence charges leveled against him. The move came against the initial wishes of chairman George McCaskey, as well as a franchise-wide decision to place a premium on character. Within weeks of the signing, McDonald was arrested following another domestic violence charge and was immediately released.

In his only media appearance of the preseason in August, three months after McDonald was sent packing, Fangio accepted blame for the ordeal. He said he was disappointed that the media didn't come down harder on him than other Bears brass.

The McDonald fallout was just one incident, but it brought about an important question: Could the Bears be placing too much faith in an assistant coach?

But when that assistant coach is in itself a mystery like Fangio, can you ever really know?

His football journey

If Fangio can at times seem out of place, it's because of the unorthodox route he's taken.

The year before he got his first job coaching football, Fangio was merely a student at East Stroudsburg University in eastern Pennsylvania, having left his football career in high school like most dreamers do. He was a solid but undersized safety at nearby Dunmore High School, known for using his instincts to bait receivers into his zone.

None of his four siblings played sports, all later working with numbers at large corporations. His father was never a coach, instead owning his own tailor shop. Fangio had no road map.

But at East Stroudsburg, the football coach, Denny Douds, taught a class on the sport. Suddenly, a kid named Victor was stopping by Douds' office, sometimes sticking around for hours to discuss football plays he'd seen on TV and ideas he'd have if only he could be in control.

Soon enough, he would be. After graduation, he took a regular substitute-teaching job at Dunmore, his alma mater, and was swiftly asked to become its defensive coordinator.

Feeling in over his head, the young Fangio dug deep in his notes, those questions he threw at Douds, now transcribed into squiggly lines of paper on a desk at lunch duty. With every idea he came up with, he shot to the head coach, Jack Henzes, to ask permission. Finally, Henzes had to tell him: "You know, Victor, I put you in charge of this."

Ascending from coaching his alma mater to anything much higher was still a lot to ask for, so Fangio made acquaintances where he could, and finally, after he'd moved onto a job with Milford Academy in Connecticut, one paid off. Joe Marciano, now the special teams coordinator for the Lions, played with Fangio at Dunmore and was a video consultant with Jim Mora's Philadelphia Stars of the USFL when a special teams coach abruptly left.

Marciano took that job, and Mora asked him to just find a friend willing to work his old post, which was essentially to watch films for graveyard shifts with very little pay, sleeping on a couch in front of the office TV and living off meals with the team.

That sounded exactly like Victor.

"He was a young guy who had a pretty good idea of what he wanted to do," said Douds, still at East Stroudsburg in his 45th year as head coach. "He would talk with anybody and everybody who wanted to talk football."

The Stars job would later balloon into a relationship with Mora that would take Fangio to the NFL as a linebackers coach with the Saints - where he'd help popularize the zone blitz while crafting the "Dome Patrol," the first four-man linebacker unit to be first-ballot Pro Bowlers - and later as a defensive coordinator with the Colts, where Mora would lose his job protecting him.

There was his nature striking out again. His mother, Alice, recalls a story in which Fangio was playing Little League Baseball on TV, and the game stopped as he went at it with an umpire, a child challenging an adult about how things were supposed to work. The announcers commented on his advanced knowledge, but there was another part of him coming alive as a young boy.

"He fights for what he thinks is right, and he doesn't care who he's fighting with," Alice Fangio said. "With Bill Polian, he didn't hesitate. Even if it means his job, he's going to fight."

In 2001, Polian, then the Colts general manager, had wanted Fangio out of Indianapolis, instructing Mora to release his defensive coordinator after his unit had slipped in the yardage rankings from 15th to 29th in three years. Fangio refused to budge, and so did Mora, and both of them were let go.

It's far from the only scrutiny Fangio has endured as a coach. The same downward slides happened in Houston and Carolina, both expansion franchises at the time.

He's said to have long sought a head-coaching opportunity, nearly having one in San Diego in 1997. The biggest gut punch might have come last season, when the 49ers broke their awkward relationship with Jim Harbaugh to hire from the NFL's most consistently dominant defense - but they went over Fangio to hire his defensive line coach, Jim Tomsula.

Yet Fangio keeps plugging away, now at his 11th coaching stop in 36 years without a single season off. The easy deduction would be that the road has developed in him a thick skin.

But again, with Fangio, it's hard to really know.

"I guess so," Alice Fangio said. "Actually, I never really noticed. … Victor's not a talker. He's pretty quiet. He says what has to be said, and that's it."

Guarded to the core

Vic Fangio isn't much into explaining Vic Fangio either. He has spoken in two brief media sessions over the past four months, and the Bears chose to not make him separately available for this story.

Players say he can be quiet around them as well, talking strictly business. Several key Bears defenders had no idea he was such a big Philadelphia Phillies fan or that he spends so much of his time away from football on the golf course.

They don't know how he reacts during games because he's not with them then. Fangio coaches from the press box, and it's there that he's been known to express himself the most, losing it when the movie he directed isn't the one he sees on the big screen.

Maybe to understand Fangio best is to not try, to accept that he lives in mystique in a place removed from the game. Perhaps without this ecosystem, a maxed-out high school safety from a non-football family wouldn't be able to do the things he has, such as beat Rodgers and the Packers in each of his four tries.

Fangio is his schemes. To attack those schemes is to attack the way he came up through the world.

Soon, the spread passing of Rodgers and the hard-nosed running of Lacy will present the ultimate first test to those schemes as they fit in in Chicago.

But early next week, win or lose, trust that he'll be back at Bears practice, having already watched the film over and over again. He'll hope the players come with their questions again, and he'll hope to have the answers.

He lives to find those answers.

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