Rod Perry’s Decision to Return Home to Rams Is a Simple One

By following both his leader and his heart, Rod Perry is a Ram again.

Sometimes making career choices in the NFL can be painful. Sometimes those decisions, such as the one Perry made to leave Seattle with Coach Chuck Knox, come naturally.

Return home. Stay with your mentor. Take over what probably is the most talented part of a not-very-talented Ram team. It should always be so simple.

This is where Perry started as a player 17 years ago, drafted in the fourth round by then-coach Knox. This is where he made a name for himself as an NFL cornerback, earning two Pro Bowl berths and a trip to Super Bowl XIV.

Now, 10 years after leaving the team to finish his career with the Cleveland Browns, three years after getting his first shot to coach in the NFL on Knox’s Seattle Seahawks’ staff, Perry has come back to the Rams as the team’s defensive backfield coach.

Why? Because Knox asked, of course. Because this is coming home for Rod Perry. Because Seattle was nice, and it was good to receive an offer to stay there even after Knox resigned, but the Rams could not be denied.

“This is where I first got started,” Perry said this week as the Rams’ staff returned from vacation to prepare for the opening of training camp Wednesday. “I was drafted by the Rams, Chuck drafted me. Home is Fresno, which is down the road, and I just feel like I’m in my back yard.”

Perry, 38, says he thought about staying in Seattle under new Coach Tom Flores, mostly because he wasn’t sure he wanted to put his family through another move. Perry had been defensive backs coach in Seattle since the 1989 season, after four seasons of coaching in college.

He thought about it quick enough, however, to be at Rams Park one day after Knox began his second stint as Ram coach. He was officially on board soon after, immediately planning what to do with the team’s array of cornerback talent--last year’s No. 1 pick Todd Lyght, last year’s most solid defender, Darryl Henley, and a talented second-year player, Robert Bailey. Then, in the draft, the Rams invested a No. 2 pick in speedy cornerback Steve Israel, making the position easily the most well-stocked on the team.

“I thought it’d be a great opportunity No. 1, to come back and coach for the team that you played for,” Perry said. “And also being with Chuck. He’s the guy who hired me into the league, and that might be first and foremost.”

When Perry was playing for Knox, he never once spoke to him about becoming an assistant coach, probably because Knox had left for the Buffalo Bills (in 1978) before Perry had seriously begun to ponder such a move.

But in the three seasons Perry played under Knox, Perry had made a clear impression.

“I always thought that Rod had the ingredients to be a coach,” Knox said recently. “No. 1, he prepared very thoroughly for each and every game and each and every opponent.

“He studied film, he analyzed routes that receivers were going to run, their breaking points. He knew where his help was going to be in various coverages. He really was a student of the game. He overcame a knee injury to become one of the best corners in the National Football League and go to the Pro Bowl.”

Perry says he decided in about his fifth season in the pros that he wanted to be an NFL coach, and that’s when he started watching how coaches did their jobs.

In his last two seasons as a player in Cleveland, Perry studied the routines of then-defensive coordinator Marty Schottenheimer and found himself attending extra meetings, figuring out the whole picture and not just his own role.

Sam Rutigliano, the head coach during Perry’s time in Cleveland, helped him get his first coaching job after he retired in 1985--as an assistant at Columbia University. The next season Perry hooked on with Fresno City College, then for two seasons as the defensive backfield coach for Fresno State.

“I think after I finished playing, I think I contacted Chuck one time, maybe even twice, might be more than that, just to let him know I was interested in coaching, let him know I had gotten into coaching,” Perry said.

Knox knew. “When he was finished playing . . . he paid his dues in coaching to learn what coaching was all about,” Knox said. “(He) did an excellent job.”

The next step was another natural: Knox hired him to coach the Seahawks’ secondary in 1989.

“And then we brought him to Seattle where he did an outstanding job primarily working with our corners, not only from a fundamental standpoint but from a mental standpoint,” Knox said. “How to be able to compete out there, how to be able to make the plays, how to be a winner at that position, how to be able to handle adversity when it strikes you at that position.”

Said Perry: “I think all coaching is a difficult transition. Naturally, you want to put your best foot forward. Playing is obviously a little bit different than coaching to the point where you’re responsible for yourself as a player.

“Now as a coach, you’re responsible for other people. Naturally, I wanted to do an excellent job as a coach because I’ve established this as a career. And the better you do, the better chance you have of getting hired with better people.

“I wanted to make sure the work I was doing would be well respected throughout the NFL, and that was a challenge, just like when you were a player, you wanted to be respected by your peers.”

On the Seattle staff, Perry was counted on for his feel for game action, almost certainly stemming from his experience as a heady, not-exactly-loaded-with-pure-talent player.

“In my personal opinion, Rod Perry’s strong point, his absolute strong point is his game-day awareness,” said assistant head coach/defense Joe Vitt, who worked closely with Perry in Seattle.

“A lot of coaches can do it on the practice field and a lot of coaches can do it in the meeting room and diagram plays and do this, but what Rod Perry is able to do is see things happen during the course of a game. . . . And when our players come to the sideline after a particular series, he’s able to make that adjustment.

“There’s just not many guys who have the ability to be a great game-day coach. He doesn’t get lost in the emotion, he doesn’t get caught up in the crowd, he doesn’t get caught up in the war on the sidelines.”

Perry and Vitt are unique in a league in which teams usually assign one coach to handle the entire secondary. As they did in Seattle, Perry will have responsibility for the cornerbacks and Vitt will concentrate on the safeties.

In Seattle, Vitt was the secondary coach before Perry came on board.

“When he took over our secondary in Seattle, we were not very respected at all,” Vitt said. “In fact, we were used to going into cities and having people ridicule our secondary.

“He brought that secondary along in Seattle to where it was one of the most respected in all of the National Football League. He has an ability to set a game plan around taking away the strength of a receiver. Whenever we play an opponent, there’s one receiver we say, ‘Hey, he’s not going to catch five, six, seven, eight, nine passes against us. He’s off the board.’ And he does a great job of it.”