GREEN BAY — Given how well the line worked on Philadelphia Eagles head coach Nick Sirianni five years ago, you could hardly blame Jonathan Gannon for recycling it with Matt LaFleur.

When Gannon was interviewing for the Eagles defensive coordinator job in 2021, Sirianni asked him a standard, straightforward question: What scheme do you plan to run?

I don’t have a scheme, Gannon replied.

And how did Sirianni respond—after initially laughing?

“He said, ‘You’d better get one,’” Gannon recalled with a chuckle Monday afternoon after being formally introduced as the Green Bay Packers’ new defensive coordinator — a job he accepted back on Jan. 28 when LaFleur offered it to him after a day-and-a-half interview.

After Gannon confirmed the exchange with Sirianni, he admitted that he said the “same thing, honestly” to LaFleur during that interview. Not because he lacks ideas and beliefs and concepts and core tenets, but because he believes those all must be malleable to his personnel.

“The point is, the game, it adapts,” Gannon explained. “I don’t really get caught up in 4-3, 3-4. We’re an NFL-style defense — hopefully, right?

“I just believe that you’ve got to continually, every year, try to adapt and solve problems — and really with your guys in mind. This is a whole new crew for me that we’re just getting ready to learn — all new, different players.

“Yeah, there are some principles, there are some things I like to do, but it’s only if our players can do it. I told them the other day, ‘If we’re not good at this, just because I like to do it, we’re not going to do it.’ That’s our job. We’ve got to put them in the best positions possible [so] they can go out and play the game. I truly believe it’s not what you play, it’s how you play.”

Gannon’s predecessor, Jeff Hafley, had a similar philosophy during his two years working for LaFleur before departing after the season to become the Miami Dolphins head coach.

“You always go into it with a vision but, certainly, that vision can change based on your personnel,” LaFleur said during the team’s post-draft rookie minicamp on Friday. “I think that’s kind of what happened with ‘Haf.’ I anticipated being more four-down front in our base defense and [instead] we got to a lot of odd-spacing structures throughout the course of the season with a linebacker on the ball.

“I think the one thing I loved about ‘JG’ is the flexibility within the scheme to do whatever we need to do to try to throw wrinkles at an offense.”

Gannon spent the last three seasons as the Arizona Cardinals head coach, going 15-36 (a .294 winning percentage) before being fired on Jan. 5 at the end of a frustrating 3-14 season. Their defenses finished 31st, 15th and 29th in scoring defense during his three seasons and 25th, 21st and 27th in total defense.

He got that job because of his success in Philadelphia, where his first unit in 2021 finished 18th in scoring defense (22.6 points per game) and 10th in total defense (328.8 yards per game). A year later, the Eagles were eighth in scoring defense (20.2 points per game) and second in total defense (301.5 yards per game) en route to a Super Bowl berth.

Consistent with his I-don’t-have-a-scheme proclamation, Gannon said he and the rest of the defensive coaches are in the process of putting together the playbook as well.

With Monday marking the first day of on-the-field practice work with players as Phase II of the offseason program began, that is a work in progress, too.

“I told the players this. I said [that] this is going to be a little different for them because as we’re teaching them things, they’re going to see tape of Philly, Minnesota, Arizona, Green Bay, San Francisco, Buffalo, Alabama, Georgia,” Gannon explained.

“I don’t really get caught up in, if you said, ‘This is my playbook. Here’s what we’re going to run,’ [then] what I said [about not having a scheme] is kind of full of you-know-what, right? Because you’re not really adapting your scheme to the players you have.

“[If you say], ‘This is just what we do,’ well, if this guy can’t do that, what are you going to do? ‘We’re just going to do that [anyway]?’ That doesn’t make sense to me.

“It really is the truth when I tell you guys this is going to be a new system this year. It’s the 2026 Green Bay Packers. It’s awesome, to me. It’s fun.”

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