Defensive Coordinator Tony White
Pre-Fall Camp Press Conference
July 30, 2024

On how he challenged himself to get better as a coordinator after last year’s success:

“A lot of it comes back to who you’re around and the one thing Coach Rhule does is he’s always looking for an advantage. Going back and looking at the things we need to work on first and foremost, like taking the ball away and being better on third downs, getting some guys matched up in the secondary, but also I was fortunate to be around some really good defensive coaches as well. Every year, it’s a new team and a new attitude so you go into it like the first year. The very first message yesterday when we met together as a defensive staff was ‘this group hasn’t done anything. I haven’t done anything.’ I’m going to approach it like that and we’re going to move forward that way and we have a lot to prove and put that chip on our shoulder and let’s roll.”

On John Butler:
“His energy, when you see him, he’s an old-school Philly guy so you’re looking at him and you don’t know how he’s going to come across and all of a sudden he sits down with you and it’s like ‘bam bam bam, don’t stop me, let me go.’ He’s really what the guys need right now in terms of energy, in terms of fire. You sit down and you listen to him talk and then you can see all of his experience come out, all of the different techniques, all the things he had to do in the league and the people he was around. I think Coach Rhule during the summer break when all this stuff happened, we had gone through and had a list of guys and we were talking to different guys and he brought the name up and it was like ‘let’s talk with him’ and immediately after talking to him for the first time, I was like ‘he might be the dude.’ Advancing the football, keeping the guys on the same path of development and making sure they’re ready for the next level and the standard’s high so it’s been refreshing to be around him so far.”

On getting John Butler ready:
“Everybody’s different. The one thing he said was good coaches are good teachers. They are able to absorb information and then they are able to put it in different buckets and to give their guys a play. The first thing you need to know about John is when we were talking defense, he was just putting it in buckets and it just goes back to the experience. ‘Oh it’s just like this, no problem. It’s just like this.’ It really made us all feel comfortable about the way he’s going to teach and it really just comes down to terminology. This is how we say it here. This is how he’s used to saying it. One of the first things he did was say ‘Hey, instead of 30 plus guys, 40 plus guys learning his wording and how he used to say things, I need to learn how we say things here’ and so again, you have a guy who knows a lot but he’s humble to the point of ‘hey, let me see let me hear let me do it how we do things here and how we can advance the guys here and roll.’ Again, it’s really neat to be around him, his thoughts, but he’s always keeping it to how we do things here.”

On Ceyair Wright:
“Extremely talented. You watch him just naturally and you can see why he was one of the top recruits in the country. He’s very athletic, very fluid in his hips. He’s pretty smart as well so again it’s just you’re trained a certain way at a different institution and then you come over here and things are vastly different. The standards are just different and the ways we do things on defense are just different than how he was used to doing things. That’s our responsibility to make sure he understands that and he’s always held to that standard. He’s putting it on the grass. A lot of guys talk about it but it’s hard to not be a man of action when you’re around Corey (Campbell), when you’re around Kristin (Coggin), especially Coach Butler and myself, all the guys in the locker room, (Isaac) Gifford, so he’s a guy we’re counting on to make sure he knows what to do and how to do it and then we’ll let him go and compete.”

On seeing John Butler interact with the players:
“Same way, he’s had a couple sit downs with the guys in terms of the defensive backs and his knowledge comes across right away. The guys know he knows what he’s talking about so I think right now it’s more so they know him football-wise, they know him Xs and Os, they’ve seen the resume. So it’s more-so building the chemistry with them off the grass, being around them so he knows and things become instinctual. That’s what fall camp is for, right? I haven’t checked in to my dorm room yet but coach is having us check in and we’re around the guys and the first thing he said was ‘hey, we’re sleeping in the dorms so no sneaking off anywhere, no nothing.’ We’re held to the same standard as the players but that’s all for us being around the guys so they know we’re in it as well.”

On if coaches get their own room:
“I got my own room so far, there’s two beds in there so I don’t know if Terrance Knighton took the other one but we’ll see, don’t jinx me like that.”

On if he upgraded to the RA room:
“No man, I have the two wooden beds. I’m going to take a picture. It might be the same room as last year so I don’t know.”

On if he had a roommate last year:
“No, luckily. This is a new year and I haven’t done anything.”

On having some of the leaders on the team acting as coaches:
“It’s all perspective right? The more perspective that you have, you understand why people say things and why people believe things. Coach actually in the spring, when things were happening, he had all those older guys, he had them together and he would go to them when a situation happened and he would say ‘hey did you see why we did this? Did you see why this was the call here? This is why we want to do this.’ You see the guys actively coaching the guys. That kind of thing, chemistry in terms of FBI football intelligence on the field, in terms of game situations is valuable, especially coming from the head man. When he pulls those guys aside and is coaching them and giving them knowledge of the game, you can’t replicate that any other way so them being around and being able to help the younger guys, if you look at all the positions, you have this group that has played and has experience and then you have a group that just showed up. We’re going to need some help from the players coaching the other players when our eyes are not there, when they’re not in, but that’s the kind of coaches you want right? Players being coaches themselves.”

On if he’s ever had a defensive line with this much experience: 
“No, you have a lot of playmakers out there, you have a lot of snaps under their belt. I think it helped last year, throwing all those guys in there and seeing what they can do. Them running with it and guys coming up out of the blue like Princewill (Umanmielen) and Cam (Lenhardt) and Riley (Van Poppel) coming up and James Williams coming out of nowhere and those guys getting valuable reps and playing ball. It’s a good problem to have. You always have problems, you have guys that didn’t play and you have too many guys that play and this is a good problem to have, especially with the way that things are set up now and being able to play those extra games later on, I think taking snaps with the big guys are going to pay dividends later.”

On Princewill Umanmielen:
“He has to be consistent. He has to show up every day. He has to take care of his body and he has to put it on the grass. When you talk about flashes, that means that you’ve seen what he can do. Now again, year two, expectations are higher and standards are raised so now it’s time to consistently be that guy versus saying you see it and then you kind of don’t hear it anymore.  He’s that type of guy, he’s a next level player. He’s big, he’s tall, he’s fast, he’s explosive, he’s twitchy, so now you have to put that knowledge behind it and you have to put that attitude behind it and make plays.”