The aura of Vic Fangio is on display as the league’s oldest defensive coordinator strolls to a white-clothed table, flips off his Philadelphia Eagles cap and folds his hands over the green brim.
He’s asked if he thought he’d ever return to the Super Bowl—he was last here as a coordinator for the San Francisco 49ers in 2013—after veering off the coordinator path to become the head coach of the Denver Broncos and after taking an ill-fated detour to Miami and a disjointed Dolphins team in ’23.
“Yeah,” he says, matter-of-factly, allowing his words a second to stand alone before adding that he chose to leave the Dolphins and come to the Eagles.
He’s asked what he remembers about his last trip to New Orleans, a narrow 34–31 loss to the Baltimore Ravens.
“We lost,” he says, again, not in a combative way but with all the energy of someone who saw the Eiffel Tower and didn’t understand what the fuss was about.
Fangio, those who know him say, never changes personally, just schematically. But he came armed with one salient point that seemed to both demystify his incredible run as one of the league’s most successful defensive minds—including piloting the league-best Eagles defense—and stand him up as the most sensible foil for his intellectual counterpart in Kansas City Chiefs head coach Andy Reid on Sunday after many other defensive coordinators have tried and failed to stop his offense.
“If you took my first three years in the NFL, 1986, 1987, 1988, and compare them to my last three years in the NFL, 2023, 2022, 2021, there’s only 4.5% more passing than there was back then,” Fangio says. “And to put that into perspective, for every 20-or-so plays, there’s one more pass.
“Teams are still running the ball; they’re just doing it a different way. The fullback has disappeared; there’s a second tight end on the field or a third wideout. So the running game was a little different, but teams are still running the ball.”
As a bit of a flourish, he dismissed this sentiment as “analytics,” instead preferring it worded as “fact.”
The fact being a long way of saying that, like Fangio, football has never really changed and is not this foreign entity unfathomable to a coach approaching his seventh decade. It’s merely adapted. And a journey back to his first defensive coordinator job at Dunmore High School provided the blueprint for constant adaptation. While preparing for Patrick Mahomes is another level of difficulty, it’s the muscle memory created from week after week of game planning against little coal-mining towns, where enrollment on the football team felt more like conscription than a voluntary activity and rabid fans bought season ticket packages. The Big 11 conference in Scranton was full of legendary coaches who would go on to set regional records, turn around programs and form the basis of what Fangio defined as his own personal work ethic.
“Vic didn’t get to call his girlfriend when he was working at Dunmore,” says Frank Pazzaglia, who coached against Fangio at Valley View high school. “He might have given her a wave, and that was the extent of their relationship. He was in that field house watching film and getting prepared.”
Searching through the box scores of Fangio’s first two seasons as a defensive coordinator in 1980 and ’81 doesn’t do the landscape justice. While eight or nine passes a game felt like a shootout—the area was dominated by running backs at the time—it was the intricacies of the run game that represented an edge. Pazzaglia said that many of the top coaches would attend college practices in the offseason and come back the following year prepared to run an entirely new offense that accentuated the tenor of the new team. Roster sizes would vary. Talent would come and go.
In breaking down Fangio’s early opponents, he’d be looking at a handful of vastly different rushing offenses. According to fellow coaches, there was:
• Houston Veer, or the split-back veer: An offense invented by a struggling Houston University team in the mid 1960s (and Remember the Titans) that is built on the idea of creating constant conflict along the defensive front, with two backs behind the quarterback. A quarterback can hand off to the play side running back, pitch it to the other back, or keep the ball depending on the defensive keys.
• Wishbone: A modified split-T formation that adds a fullback immediately behind the quarterback and two running backs split on either side of the fullback. This gives an offense a triple-option off the snap, with the quarterback potentially able to hand the ball off much quicker if the unlocked defender isn’t trying to crash down on the play. A quarterback can also pitch or keep, with the other running back able to participate as a lead blocker.
• I formation: A formation with the fullback and running back aligned immediately behind the quarterback. Blocking power plays effectively out of this set allows for offensive linemen to create devastating double teams and open up gaps of space. The offense is ideally suited for a bigger, more physical offensive line and a feature back who thrives on a high volume and contact.
• Delaware Wing T: A dizzying multiple-option offense that combines smaller, hybrid receivers and backs into what is essentially a four-back system in which coaches weaponize presnap motion and other sweeping backfield action to confuse a defense and get them misaligned.
“You had to figure out a way,” Fangio says. “If the Jimmy’s and Joe’s weren’t good enough, you had to give yourself a chance. And we were doing that.”
He added, as only he could: “The one year we were only 5–6 but I swear it might have been the best coaching job we’ve ever done. We just had no talent.”
While the list of these offenses may feel dusty, relegated to some black and white blur on some old projector screen, they are the baseline of what has made coaches such as Reid so successful because, like Fangio, they formulated the foundational years of Reid’s education as well. This season alone, Kansas City has gashed opponents with an inverted version of the wishbone formation, utilizing the concept to score twice against the Buffalo Bills in the AFC championship game. Instead of taking the ball from under center, Mahomes is in the shotgun with a back behind him and two tight ends to either side. It’s become one of their most feared concepts.
The #Chiefs take a page out of the Ravens playbook with their Patrick Mahomes inverted wishbone touchdown. The Ravens ran it in Week 4. And KC scored on it last night. Fake the dive and pull the TE’s as lead blockers. #ChiefsKingdom pic.twitter.com/0cFOqJJ4kJ
— Nick Jacobs (@Jacobs71) January 28, 2025
The Chiefs motioned out of a split-T formation in last year’s Super Bowl to run an unorthodox handoff to Rashee Rice. Utilizing Xavier Worthy and, previously, players like Tyreek Hill as potential ballcarries out of the backfield, is heavily inspired by the elemental Wing-T playbook. Interestingly enough, the Delaware Wing T was an integral part of the education of Matt Nagy, the Chiefs’ offensive coordinator who went to college at Delaware.
“As an offense, we try and be multiple,” Nagy says. “We try and do a lot of things. I have the Wing-T background, and we do some stuff in the run game that can magnify some of those elements. We do a lot of zone reads, but every now and then, if we get a creative play, there could be a Wing-T element to it.”
It’s an element that Fangio has probably come across at some point, during one of those long nights at the field house. Nick Donato, a friend of Fangio’s and another one of the area’s most successful coaches with more than 30 years on the sidelines and six championships, said, “Victor was always so dedicated,” and that Fangio’s mentor, longtime Dunmore coach Jack Henzes, “was always sound. His kids were always where they were supposed to be.”
Back then, the Fangio defense was a 5-0 front or a 5-3. With the Eagles, it’s a little less predictable but equally as maddening. Christian Parker, one of the rising star coaches on Philadelphia's staff, has been with Fangio at two separate stops, in Denver and Philadelphia. Despite the 33-year age gap between the two, he, too, has observed the aura of Fangio.
Unchanging, yet always ready to change.
“Whatever we have, he’s going to make do,” Parker says. “And that comes from his start. Whether it’s our personnel, whether it’s the schedule, he’s going to make it work. Every team is different. Talent is different. If you look at his teams from San Francisco to Chicago to Denver to Miami, it looks different because he’s going to highlight people based on his strengths. That speaks to his start in high schools.”
Or, a few minutes before ducking out of the interview room, putting it the way only he could, Fangio says he just wants to “play good,” and “we’ll see what happens.”
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Eagles DC Vic Fangio's Knack for Adjustments Are Rooted in Pennsylvania.
