PHILADELPHIA — Eagles defensive coordinator Vic Fangio sauntered to the front of the defensive team meeting room on the first day of organized team activities last spring and delivered a line that immediately put the players on their heels.

“It’s not your fault you don’t work hard,” he said.

“Work hard?” defensive lineman Milton Williams said quizzically last week, mimicking the reaction of a group of men who toiled for years to get to their positions.

“It’s not your fault, you just don’t know how,” Fangio went on. “But that’s going to change now that I’m here.”

The Eagles’ defense was coming off a dismal 2023 season in which it finished 31st in passing defense, 30th in points allowed and 29th in the red zone. The switch from Sean Desai to Matt Patricia as defensive playcaller late in the season turned a struggling unit into a dysfunctional one. Philadelphia dropped six of seven to finish the year, leading to the exits of Desai and Patricia and the hiring of the 66-year-old Fangio, one of the most accomplished defensive coaches of the modern era who had long been the apple of the organization’s eye.

Fangio wasn’t talking about last year’s group so much as the modern-day climate in sports. Athletes haven’t changed over the years, Fangio insisted during his introductory news conference, but the standards have.

“People are not expecting as much out of players as we used to expect,” he said. “The players are willing to work. Never had an issue with that. And they’re still willing to work. But we as the so-called adults in the room need to push them.”

Push Fangio has. He successfully lobbied coach Nick Sirianni to increase the number and length of practices. The sessions were described by one defensive player as “a lot more excruciating” compared to seasons past. That’s part of the formula that sparked a dramatic turnaround as the Eagles finished the regular season No. 1 in both total defense and passing defense, second in points per game and fourth in the red zone.

But it’s in the mind of Fangio where much of the magic lives. A defensive savant with 40 years of professional experience, he’s described by players and former colleagues as a coach who can identify opponent tells and decode offenses at a virtuoso level — unearthing nuggets he’ll distill to his players, detail by painstaking detail, during the week. He deploys a scheme he has spent decades cultivating and others around the league have long tried to duplicate, but is adaptive enough to evolve in real time if a game takes on a different form than anticipated.

His gifts have found a talented and responsive group of players (did you see Jalen Carter wreaking havoc in the snow?), creating a force that has the Eagles on the cusp of a Super Bowl appearance.

Fangio and his defense are hoping to dominate once again come Sunday’s NFC Championship Game against the Washington Commanders (3 p.m. ET, Fox).

“Coach Vic, I don’t know what he sees,” edge rusher Nolan Smith said, “but that man is a mastermind.”

IT DOESN’T TAKE long before a discussion with an Eagles defensive player regarding Fangio’s approach turns to box drills.

It’s a simple enough concept: There are four points designated by a coach on the field, and the player has to go full-bore to reach all of them by backpedal, shuffle or breaking forward before sprinting through and out of the “box.”

“It’ll burn your legs up,” cornerback Isaiah Rodgers said.

Fangio implemented the drill early in the offseason as both a tone-setter and a means to improve conditioning. Even some of the assistant coaches went through the drill.

“I looked at it more as an initiation thing,” defensive back Eli Ricks said. “We started with that and we only added more and more as each week kept going.”

The drills had a big enough impact that the team made up black T-shirts with four orange boxes on them, which are proudly worn by some members of the defense during practice under their pads and jerseys.

The Eagles added more practices to their training camp slate and upped the amount of padded practices in season while staying within the limits collectively bargained by the NFL and NFLPA. It helped prepare the group for a demanding workload, no one more so than Carter, whose snaps jumped from 563 during the regular season as a rookie in 2023 to 831 this year (and 919 including the playoffs, second in the NFL only to Broncos defensive end Zach Allen‘s 975). Carter’s dominant, two-sack performance Sunday against the Los Angeles Rams in the divisional round of the playoffs shows there has been no drop off.

JALEN CARTER SACK!

📺: #LARvsPHI on NBC
📱: Stream on @NFLPlus + Peacock pic.twitter.com/xbICRDUTHw

— NFL (@NFL) January 19, 2025

“I remember with the D-line when [Fangio] first came in he was like, ‘I know you guys rotated a lot last year, but I’m going to need you guys to play a lot more reps,'” Ricks said. “That was like the first or second day he came in. When we heard that we realized, ‘OK, this guy really wants to work hard.'”

With their bodies ready, Fangio and the players attacked the mental side of the game.

Fangio is not unique in the long hours he logs poring over opponent film. It’s what he extracts from the tape that separates him from many of his peers.

“It’s like you and I staring at a painting,” said Ed Donatell, who coached alongside Fangio for 11 seasons and served as his defensive coordinator when Fangio was head coach of the Denver Broncos from 2019-21. “Some people have this observation gift of seeing more. He can look at it and maybe get a little tip from a tight end or from a quarterback pre-snap or from a lineman, and everybody’s going to talk about doing that — he’s just very good at it.”

Defensive meetings under Fangio can be grueling. “It’s long, so you better get your mind right,” defensive tackle Jordan Davis said of the sessions that can extend to more than 90 minutes. “He goes through it all. He goes through the nitty gritty.”

But Fangio equips the players with the knowledge he has collected, both from that week’s film and from his years in the business.

“Every team we play against, he’s going over every formation, he’s got percentages of what they like to run out of this formation,” Williams explained. “‘If the tight end is off right here, they’re looking for a plunge coming back.’ Or, ‘They’re going to motion him over here and snap it.’ He breaks down every little single detail and gives it to us.”

Fangio’s scheme is a mix of simple and complex. The overall premise is to create a “shell” — the shape if you were to draw a line from the cornerbacks on the outside to two deep safeties in the middle — to contain offenses and limit explosive plays. He doesn’t blitz much (the Eagles blitz rate of 19.1% ranked 28th during the regular season) and doesn’t deploy many complex fronts, but as All-Pro linebacker Zack Baun put it, “He does a lot of exotic stuff coverage-wise that takes a really smart and communicative defense to handle something like that.”

“When the ball is snapped, the guys just don’t run to a spot and show the ID to the quarterback,” Donatell explained. “It’s kind of mushy. It’s not clear, so sometimes [the QBs] are into their first or second step and they still don’t know. It’s a delayed identification for the quarterback if done properly. He works very hard to not give any tells from any position on his defense to the offense.”

Players are given clear job descriptions to avoid overreaching and promote playing with “certainty and aggression,” as defensive lineman Thomas Booker put it.

Physicality has been constantly promoted, dating back to the offseason when Fangio showed clips of big hits from past players like Ray Lewis to capture the spirit of the defense he wants to run.

Physical plays, from hard hits to forced fumbles, are charted by Fangio and are the types of plays that will get a rise out of the grizzled coach. “That’s the kind of stuff he eats up,” Davis said. “He loves it.”

ON GAME DAYS, Fangio calls plays and formations from his perch in the coach’s box so he can get a big-picture view of how things are unfolding. Donatell noted Fangio will look down at his sheets and make adjustments between series, but his eyes are on the action — not the play sheet — working to understand the opponent’s strategy to implement a counterattack.

“He’s playing chess,” Donatell said.

“There’s not too many guys I’ve been around that really knew what game they were at. If he gets into a game that’s not the game we thought it was going to be, he knows how to adjust and change. They can get a drive on you early in the game or something, but then he’s going to be locked and loaded by the second quarter.”

The Eagles agreed to hire Fangio on Jan. 25, 2024, less than 24 hours after he mutually parted ways with the Miami Dolphins after serving for one year as their defensive coordinator. There were questions upon Fangio’s arrival in Philadelphia just days after about the ability of this old-school coach to coexist with today’s player.

Some Dolphins players made it known upon Fangio’s departure they weren’t sad to see him go. A Dolphins team source described Fangio as not a good culture fit in Miami‘s player-friendly environment cultivated by head coach Mike McDaniel, adding that the dynamic between Fangio and the younger players on the team in Philly will be worth monitoring.

“I did hear that and I was like, man, if you can’t take coaching, you’re soft, to me,” said Williams of the noise that followed Fangio out of Miami. “I want a coach like that, that’s going to be on me, because that’s going to help me get better. If you’ve got a coach that’s holding everyone accountable no matter who you are or what you’re making, what accolades you got, he’s treating everybody the same, I feel like that helps everybody grow and get better as a player, especially as the year goes on.”

One of the outspoken Miami players, Dolphins safety Jevon Holland, expressed the sentiment that “even though he was our coach, he wanted to be somewhere else.” And there could be some merit to that. There was mutual interest in Fangio replacing Jonathan Gannon as defensive coordinator last year in Philly, but Fangio ultimately agreed to join the Dolphins before it was clear Gannon would leave to take the Arizona head coaching job.

Fangio is from Dunmore, Pennsylvania, about 100 miles north of Philadelphia and has family in the area.

He’s an avid Phillies fan and got his first pro job as a defensive assistant for the USFL’s Philadelphia Stars.

“It was exactly 40 years ago when I started my pro coaching career across the street at Veterans Stadium,” he said upon arrival, “and I thought it’d be cool to hopefully end it here.”

Asked recently about whether he’d like to be a head coach again, Fangio said, “No, I’m happy to be here right now.”

Despite that contentment, Fangio is gruff and often comes across as grumpy. He needs some things to be just so. After a game, as he makes his way from the coaches booth to field level, Fangio has a specific place designated for him in the elevator — the back left corner — a fact a reporter found out from a staffer following a recent game when he unknowingly stood in that spot and was politely asked to move.

The same exactness applies to his craft.

“He’s just like a grandpa that just don’t tolerate any BS,” Williams said. “He wants something done a certain way and his way is proven that it works if you do it how he coaches you to do it. He’s been around this game a long time, so he knows what it looks like, he knows what winning looks like, he knows what being great looks like and what all of that takes.”

His sense of humor does poke through on occasion, breaking up the monotony of the meetings. Sometimes he’ll imitate a player’s sack dance in front of the room, like when he flicks his wrist to wipe the sweat off his forehead like Josh Sweat does after a takedown.

He’ll tell an outdated joke, maybe about an “old song, an old movie that ain’t nobody seen,” Williams said. “He’ll have to point at one of the old coaches and be like, ‘Oh, he knows what I’m talking about.'”

Fangio has a bunch of one-liners, most of which should not be shared outside of the meeting rooms, players said.

There’s one Ricks felt comfortable relaying: Whenever he’s showing opponent tape and comes across a sloppy play, he’ll quip: “That’s a sin dipped in misery.”

“He’s really a funny guy if you sit around and listen to him talk long enough,” defensive back Cooper DeJean said.

Mostly, though, it’s all business. Fangio’s demanding, nonfiltered approach might not be for everybody.

But as Donatell points out, players ultimately want to feel prepared and in position to maximize their abilities so they can have success, and that’s what Fangio provides — along with a rough and tumble attitude that has been adopted by the entire unit.

“He’s tough, he’s hard-nosed, he’s East Coast. I love all those things about him.” Sirianni said. “Just got a ton of respect for him, and sure glad he’s here.”