Before his Super Bowl run with the Philadelphia Eagles, New Orleans Saints head coach Kellen Moore spent a forgettable 2023 season with the Los Angeles Chargers under then-head coach Brandon Staley.
The Chargers fired Staley after a brutal loss to the Las Vegas Raiders in 2023, then passed over Moore as his replacement to hire Jim Harbaugh instead.
Though their first partnership didn’t pan out, it didn’t prevent them from joining forces again, this time with Moore sitting in the head coach’s seat. According to a league source, Moore is hiring Staley to be his defensive coordinator with the 2025 New Orleans Saints.
The hiring is the first Moore has made on the defensive side of the ball, and it comes at a crucial time with the NFL scouting combine set to begin next week. After running some variation of Dennis Allen’s scheme for the previous 10 seasons, Staley may very well want to stock his defense with a different kind of player than the ones the Saints coveted under Allen.
With Staley now in the fold, New Orleans likely will fill out its defensive coaching staff quickly. Of the coaches from last season’s staff, only defensive line coach Brian Young has not been hired elsewhere yet.
Staley, who spent last season in an assistant head coach role with the San Francisco 49ers, was once considered one of the NFL’s premier young defensive coaches.
The 42-year-old got his NFL start under then-Chicago Bears defensive coordinator Vic Fangio in 2017. He spent three seasons with Fangio, two in Chicago and one in Denver, before taking over as the Los Angeles Rams defensive coordinator in 2020.
The Rams finished that 2020 season ranked No. 1 in both scoring and total defense, fueling Staley’s rapid ascent as a head coaching candidate. The Chargers hired him in 2021.
Staley couldn’t replicate that success with the Chargers, who never finished better than 20th in scoring or total defense during his time there.
He comes to New Orleans after working under some of the brightest minds in football, including Kyle Shanahan last year in San Francisco, Sean McVay in Los Angeles, and Fangio in Chicago and Denver. But it took Staley a while to ascend the coaching ladder.
Staley, a former college quarterback at Dayton, spent 10 years coaching at mostly lower-level college football programs — including stops with Division III schools John Carroll and St. Thomas, and Hutchinson junior college — before he caught his NFL break, coaching linebackers for Fangio’s 2017 Bears team.
