When the Green Bay Packers surprisingly hired Jeff Hafley to be their new defensive coordinator back in January, the first task for those who cover the team was to find out how the defense was going to play and what would change compared to Joe Barry's version of the unit.

The answer wasn't obvious, and to a certain degree it still isn't. After all, Jeff Hafley has no DC experience in the NFL. He worked for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Cleveland Browns, and San Francisco 49ers as an assistant and position coach. His primary experiences as a coach came at the collegiate level, as a co-defensive coordinator at Ohio State and head coach at Boston College.

"Nobody loves single-high/middle-field-closed coverages more than Haf," said Mitch Wolfe, who covers Boston College for BC Eagle Insider. "Pretty aggressive with blitzing. Mostly a 4-3/even front guy, but has some more diverse stuff in his bag. He loves man coverage."

But what he learned under Robert Saleh in San Francisco and used in college football might not be applicable to today's NFL. The game progressed to a two-high world, and single-high heavy schemes became obsolete and easily exploited by offensive minds like Sean McVay, Kyle Shanahan, and, guess who, Matt LaFleur.

LaFleur knows that, and that's why he said the defense will still have its eyes on the quarterback.

"More vision on the quarterback, because he's ultimately going to take you to where the ball is going to go. And it's hard to do that when you're playing with your back to the quarterback," the Packers head coach said. "Not to say that we won't be that. There's certainly going to be circumstances when you want to man up and play some match coverage. I would say a big part of what we're going to do, especially from a coverage standpoint, is going to have vision on the quarterback."

Inspiration

Presumably, the Packers are expected to run a defense like what the 49ers and now the New York Jets, under Robert Saleh, run. But even they adapted the trends and ideas.

Last year, the 49ers were more drastic to do that, hiring Steve Wilks to replace DeMeco Ryans. It didn't work out, so they promoted defensive pass game specialist Nick Sorensen to DC, going back to what they had done with Ryans.

Even so, the old cover 3 model in which Robert Saleh developed as a coach can't exclude new options.

Last year, both the Houston Texans with DeMeco Ryans and the 49ers had high numbers both in cover 3 and quarters coverage, with less cover 1 and cover 6 than other teams — especially those that went to the playoffs. In the regular season, San Francisco was relatively quarters-heavy, even though cover 3 still tends to be the primary coverage for most NFL teams.

But one of the teams that wasn't cover 3-heavy was, surprisingly, Robert Saleh's Jets. Quarters and cover 1 were the most frequent coverages in New York.

When asked about his philosophy, Jeff Hafley talked more about attitude and less about scheme. Sure enough, he has no reason to anticipate what he will do.

"Our philosophy is get really good at what we do and do it over and over again so we're playing 100 mph," Hafley mentioned. "If you try to do too much, you slow them down. That's definitely not what we want to do."

As usually happens with smart coaches, all depends on the players. Hafley will use the offseason and training camp to find out what they execute well, what works and what doesn't.

And we will only have a clear idea of what the Packers will run when they face the Philadelphia Eagles in Brazil, 99 days from now.

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