Falcons’ Jeff Ulbrich: ‘It just was a no-brainer in so many ways’

On his interview process leaving New York and coming to Atlanta: “So, obviously, the change was made at the defensive coordinator position. It wasn’t too long after that when Raheem [Morris] gave me a call and asked if I was interested. Obviously, I was, for so many reasons. So, then we set up the interview. It’s funny because Raheem and I have a very close relationship, but I love the fact that we turned this interview into a very official interview where it wasn’t just ‘Rah’ [Raheem Morris] and myself just chopping it up like buddies. I thought they were very thorough, asked amazing questions. It was a great opportunity for myself to really get to know, and for them to get to know me, everybody else in the organization that I didn’t have previous experience with. So, it was an amazing interview process, and ultimately, they chose myself – which, again, so grateful, so excited.”

On whether it was a no-brainer when he was offered the job: “Absolutely, yeah. This really, over the six years I was here, became home to us. My daughter, she graduated from here. Both boys went to high school here and spent a lot of time here. All my children and my wife, they’ve really embraced Atlanta as home. An opportunity to come back is just, my wife is excited. My children are excited. I’m excited. So, it just was a no-brainer in so many ways.”

On why things will be different this time around coaching with Raheem Morris: “I’m a different human being, and he is as well. As much as I’d like to say, you know, I wish we would have stayed these past four years and never left and just kept it rolling, we needed that opportunity to leave. He needed it to leave to really get to know Sean [McVay] and the way he did things. For myself, to spend four years with Robert Saleh and the rest of the coaches that I got exposed to in New York, it just provided just unbelievable growth – not just schematically, but how to build a defensive roster, how to communicate with the building, all of it. So, I really believe, although my core principles are the same in many ways, my football brain is in a completely different place. I’m really excited for Raheem and myself. I’m going to spend the first two weeks here to really self-scout and assess what they did last year. It’s an opportunity to learn the roster. It’s an opportunity to learn Raheem’s scheme and the Falcons scheme and what they tried to get accomplished last year. Then after a couple weeks of that, we’re going to sit down and get into the lab. This is what I think we can integrate what we did in New York. This is what we can refine that you were doing. This is something that we need to eliminate and really provide and create something that’s maybe never been done before from a schematic standpoint. So, excited about that, too.”

On his thought process in deciding which base defense to run: “It’s interesting because defensive football has changed in so many ways. If we look back 15, 20 years ago, there were 3-4 teams and there were 4-3 teams, and you were one or the other. It’s not that way anymore. Offenses have jumped off the playbook. The day and age of 2-by-2 normal spacing, lines, that day of offensive football is gone. You’ve got designer drop back. You have designer run game. You have all this stuff that has become very challenging from a defensive perspective. So, it’s really forced us from a defensive standpoint to get more multiplicity in all that we do, front-wise, coverage-wise, all of that. So, we’re going to be multiple, and we’re going to do some unique things that are going to be 3-4-ish and 4-3-ish at times. But, I think that multiplicity is necessary nowadays. It really is. Now, it’s just being very cognizant of the fact that you don’t want to dilute it with too much stuff. So, this next two weeks, learn his stuff, and then after that, when we get into the lab, creating something really unique and new, but at the same time not making it so big that we’re paralyzing the players. Then, to your point, really refining also to the men that we have and the players that are here on this roster right now and what are their strengths so we can feature them as best we can. So, a lot of work to be done, but it’s the type of work that you wake up in the morning, you’re fired up to get started with.”

On whether his experience as a interim head coach helped him as a defensive coordinator: “Absolutely. Not just as a defensive coordinator, really as an assistant to Head Coach Raheem Morris too. I learned even more than I knew the value of truth-tellers on your staff. I think sometimes as an assistant coach, you take it as I’m going to eliminate every problem from the head coach’s table so he can just thrive and do his thing. When in reality, there’s some things you need to take off the head coach’s table. There’s certain things that need to be told to the head coach that are occurring because a lot of times what I found in that interim role was, although it was interim, it was like I felt the shift and the way people talked to me and treated me and what they said to me and the lack of truth sometimes was really detrimental. It just reinforced the idea that Raheem is going to need me in that way to make sure that I’m always telling the truth and maybe eliminating some of the blind spots that he doesn’t see. The other big one for me was the delegation piece, which I failed at, to be completely honest. I became the interim, and I’ve made this analogy to a lot of people. The head coach, let’s say he works 10 hours a day, and say the defensive coordinator works 10 hours a day. Well, when Robert Saleh was fired, his 10 hours didn’t go anywhere. So it became a thing, and there is an element of a failure for myself in that way because I didn’t delegate. I just took it all on myself. In my mind’s eye, I was trying to create continuity, and I didn’t want to fracture the staff, and he’s the coordinator. I thought the best thing for me to do at that point in time was just try to keep everybody in the same role that they had just so we could keep things rolling, and it wasn’t the right thing to do. It wasn’t as I look back. I should have delegated. I should have given the defensive coordinator responsibilities to someone else because it’s just, in my opinion, it’s too hard, especially when it’s thrown on you in the middle of the season. It’s just you hadn’t prepared for it. You’re learning on the run. So delegation and truth-telling were the two things that will never leave me when they got reinforced at the highest level.”

On improving the pass rush for next season and whether getting sacks are his top priority: “Absolutely. There’s no great defense that’s ever lived in this league that didn’t affect the quarterback. You’ve got to affect the quarterback in two ways. Either we affect him physically, get him off the spot, sack him, hit him, or we affect him from the standpoint of from a coverage perspective and try to confuse him. So last year, and again, I’ve got to really reserve my comments until I really take a deep dive on this defense and really learn at the highest level to make those comments, but I do. You can’t thrive in this league from a defensive perspective without a good pass rush. Affecting the quarterback is my top priority. Getting them off the spot, hits, all those things. In New York, we did that at a high clip. It’s a combination of a lot of things, though. It’s not just the men’s all the time. Sometimes it’s the scheme. Sometimes it’s the context of the game. There’s a lot of things that go into that. In New York, we didn’t operate with a ton of leads, so that’s another factor that doesn’t always get accounted for where you get opportunities to let your guys jump out their shoes and just go because you’re defending 50-50 ball all the time. It’s important. It’s going to be an absolute priority, and it’s something that has to be fixed.”

On whether he’ll be calling the defensive plays on gameday: “Yeah, I’m going to call the plays on game day, but this is going to be a collaboration at the highest level between Raheem [Morris], myself, Jerry Gray, Mike Rutenberg. The list goes on and on. We have an amazing defensive staff, guys that have been around great defenses, guys that understand ball at a high level, and it would be criminal of me not to take advantage of these guys. We’re going to have some hard conversations, and that’s another thing that’s beautiful about this opportunity for myself is the equity in the relationship that I have with Raheem is such that we can have drag out, like if you were an outsider looking in, you’d be like, damn, they hate each other. But we’re capable of having those really, really hard conversations, but understanding that we’re trying to create something special, and when we walk out that door, we walk out that door together. So it’s going to be our defense. It’s going to be the Falcons’ defense. That’s what it’s going to be.”

On what kind of teacher he is for the people who have never worked with him before: “I try to say that I adapt as best I can to every learner. So I put a lot into learning the new-age learner, where the phone has become an appendage. It’s an extra hand or foot or finger and they’re so cognizant of it. So they learn in a different way than I learned. I’m getting this argument a lot of times with old football heads of like, well, when I played or when I coached back 20 years ago, they could sit there and grind through five hours of tape and take notes the entire time, but I don’t believe in that way of coaching or teaching anymore, I don’t. I think the best teachers in this league and the best teachers in the world are ones that adapt to the learners. So I’ve picked up a lot of some really cool things and ways to engage the player, to teach in a little bit different way and I look forward to learning from all these guys in this building of even more ways to teach. So what type of teacher? It depends on the learner. It really does.”

On multiplicity of the defense and whether he’ll look to build off the various strengths of the players or help guide them in a different role: “Yeah, there’s going to be both those elements that live here. There’s going to be some stuff that we really adapt, because we’ve got some players with some superpowers we’ve got to take advantage of and in that way, we’ll feature them as best we can, just like for the front example. But at the same time, the multiplicity is there to create. This is what I don’t know if our first run here, if we always had that schematic answer when things got sideways on game day and the ability to pivot when an offense pivots. So the multiplicity, it’s powerful in that way that you got answers. You know, to just say, we’ve got to play harder and faster and more physical, that’s one way to approach things. You know, or you create real schematic answers to problems, obviously, as you game plan, but even more powerful sometimes is the pivot on game day that you have the ability to do when you do have multiplicity to your fronts and coverages.”

On going with a younger direction on the defensive line with DL David Onyemata and DL Grady Jarrett both being over 30: “Yeah, I look forward to getting to know David. Obviously, I know Grady really well. Cornerstones of this defense for a long, long time and amazing players, both of them. And I know Grady, you know, just because I’ve spent so much time with Grady, an amazing person in this community as well so I’m excited to work with both of them.”

On how much input he will have on what free agents they keep and building the defense: “I’d like to say a lot. You know, I’ve just gotten to know Terry [Fontenot] a little bit now, and obviously I’ve known Raheem [Morris] for forever. But I already feel it in this building. There’s such a vibe of collaboration, and everybody’s going to be heard and seen and valued. So I’d like to say I’ll have a lot of input as far as that’s concerned. I’d like to say the entire defensive staff is going to have a lot of input as far as how we build this defense. I think that, especially from a defense perspective, all the scheme in the world is great, but the players make this thing come to life. They always have and they always will.”

On how his football brain has changed drastically: “You know, when we came around here the first time, we were implementing the old Seattle system. And the Seattle system had some amazing strengths to it, and it did some things that were, at the time, fairly revolutionary in some ways. And I loved it and believed in it. It’s just the game has changed. It really has. These offensive coordinators are absolute pains in my butt because it’s not like the old day of, all right, you play cover three, here’s the three beaters. You play cover four, here’s the quarter beaters. It’s not that way anymore. They watch your tape, they learn your rules and then they beat you ways that you’ve never been beat before. So because of that, you need more variety in coverage. You need more multiplicity in the front. You need more scheme. So that’s where I’ve changed completely. Really, you know, I want to provide the players with the best opportunity to be successful on game day. Well, sometimes just playing the same coverage over and over again, you’re not doing that. You’re actually putting their chin out there and letting people take haymakers. So from that way, I’ve grown a lot. A lot.”

On creating something defensively that hasn’t been seen before: “Yeah, yeah, that’s Raheem [Morris], as you guys know, has an amazing brain that way. He’s got the beautiful mind. And some of the guys, Jerry Gray is an amazing defensive coach, he’s been that for a long, long time. So I’m going to lean on these guys, Mike Rutenberg, and the list goes on and on, but I’m going to lean on these guys for us to really put our brains together and challenge everything. You know, a lot of times, any walk of life, it’s just, ‘That’s the way we’ve done things. That’s the way it’s always been done.’ You know that’s not good enough. You know, I want to know the whys behind it all and then ultimately, I want the players to understand the whys as well. So, you know, we’re going to grind. It’s going to be fun. It’s going to be exciting. It’s going to be hard. It’s going to be long hours, but it’s going to be absolutely worth it at the end of the day.”

On the timing of his interviews with the Jets and Falcons: “No, it was okay. So I actually did the interview with New York before I did the interview with Atlanta. So that was on a – New York was like on a Sunday and then like one or two days after the fact, I did the one with the Falcons. So the timing was actually – it worked out perfect as it was.”

On the importance of being able to teach inside of a game: “Absolutely, yeah. The ability to, like I said, to pivot on game day, it’s the difference between good defenses and great defenses, you know, and that ability to pivot is bigger than just a coach knowing the schematic answer. It’s like you said, it’s the ability to teach it and coach it and then to really understand why we’re pivoting here, you know, and how are we being attacked and then what’s our answer to that? I think that good coaches, they provide players answers and that’s what we’ve got to do.”