New Rams DC: Ken Flajole

So, who's this Ken Flajole guy who's about to become the Rams' defensive coordinator? He's currently the LB coach at Carolina.

Now see, that's already a good move. Hire a defensive coach from a good defensive team. Some teams would just hire the defensive coach from a team whose defense sucks, just because he's a buddy of the head coach, MARTZ. At least if Steve Spagnuolo is hiring buddies, they're buddies with actual records to run on.

Flajole has coached LBs at Carolina since '03, so he coached Will Witherspoon there. The Carolina defense has been near the top of the league most of all that time, and Flajole has developed a bunch of good LBs like the (always injured now-Saint) Dan Morgan, Thomas Davis and Jon Beason. He was secondary and LB coach at Seattle from 1999-2002. In 1999, the Seahawks led the league in interceptions. Flajole was a LB himself, though never in the pros, graduating from Pacific Lutheran in 1976. He coached at eight different college stops before moving up to Seattle. That includes a stop in Missouri's staff that had Andy Reid, so there's your Rams HC, OC and DC now all branching off the Reid tree.

Can't say I can guess a lot about Ken Flajole as a defensive coordinator. I do know that between the names Spagnuolo, Shurmur and Flajole, the Rams are probably going to have the most misspelled coaching staff in the brief history of the Internet.

But seriously, Ken Flajole should still be a big upgrade for the Ram defense. He's worked with Witherspoon and the Rams have a bunch of young guys he could develop into special players. The Ram D can be a monster if Flajole can just get Pisa Tinoisamoa into the right position a larger percentage of the time. Plus I'm seeing greater and greater promise for a player like Chris Chamberlain. And, if the Rams draft a MLB with one of their top picks, they've got a coach who could develop him into a monster. He's shown a good record of working around injuries. For other coordinators, that's apparently a free pass for their unit to suck. Flajole just makes it work. PLUS Flajole's record in Seattle shows he'll run an aggressive, ball-hawking secondary, philosophically a big step up from a Rams' secondary that, outside of O.J. Atogwe, rarely seems to pick off a pass. Assuming he's going to be running a lot of the Spagnuolo defense from New York, I'm mixing a big batch of Rams defense Kool-Aid right now.

Anybody want some?