Chargers News: How Jesse Minter, Jim Harbaugh Are Looking To Revamp LA's Defense

There's... a lot of room for growth.

New head coach Jim Harbaugh has almost completely overhauled your Los Angeles Chargers' coaching corps, populating his assistant ranks with several trusted contributors. One of his most intriguing fresh additions is defensive coordinator Jesse Minter, who'll be joining him from their national championship-winning University of Michigan program.

In a recent conversation with Eric Smith of Chargers.com, Minter explained how he intends to tackle LA's defense in 2024.

"You know, I think philosophically of what we want the defense to look like. When I first got with [Harbaugh], it was like, 'Ok, what do you want the defense to look like?' He's been a quarterback and an offensive coach a lot of his career, but he's had really successful defenses as a head coach. It was really just, 'Tell me what you want it to look like.' Then work it to make that come to life," Minter said. "He has a lot of trust in me, we can communicate well together. I do think the culture that he creates — from a physical standpoint, from a toughness standpoint, how we play the game complimentary — helps build a good defense. I think it's really just like the culture that he instills that allows you to play tough, physical, hard-nosed defense. It's really been that way everywhere that he's been."

Minter went on to detail his approach, tactically speaking.

"No. 1, we want to have standards for how we play. I go back to the how we play versus what we play," Minter added. "Particularly in this first year, you know we need to have a really high standards of what we want the defense to look like, how we want to play physical, how we want to attack the football, how we want to attack the opposing offenses with through various things. Sometimes that's coverage, sometimes that's pressure, a combination of both. But we want to be a group that trust each other, that plays together, that has an 11-on-1 mentality as we're lining up to play against another team. It's the ultimate team defense that is built around its best players. Try to maximize our best players ability while at the same time having a defense flexible enough that, no matter who we play, we can take away their weapons, what they do best. We attack the ball, we attack the quarterback. At the same time, schematically, having enough answers and I think that's what's allowed us to have success against multitude of different offenses over the years.

Last year's Chargers squad, despite being led by a former Super Bowl-leading defensive coordinator in then-head coach Brandon Staley. The club's defense ranked 28th in total opponent yards allowed and 24th in points permitted.