49ers defensive coordinator Robert Saleh driven by details of job

SANTA CLARA - Forty-Niners defensive coordinator Robert Saleh nearly went into the furniture business.

This was 2001. Saleh was 22 years old, fresh out of Northern Michigan University, where he played tight end and majored in finance. He got a job at Comerica Bank and prepared to take over the family business, a furniture store in Detroit.

“If you just talk furniture,” Saleh said on a sunny afternoon at the 49ers practice facility, “there are so many different things you have to organize at one time. There's your warehousing, your employees, your bookkeeping. There's the sales part.

“Football, no different. You've got D-line, linebackers, DBs. You've got a playbook. You've got breakdowns. You've got self-scouting. You've got to be very detailed.”

Saleh's older brother, David, was a financial adviser for Morgan Stanley and worked in the World Trade Center. On 9/11, David was in the South Tower when the plane hit. He escaped.

“That was the ‘aha' moment for me,” Saleh said. “It gave me an opportunity to reflect on whether or not I was doing the things I wanted to do. My brother, did he get to do things that he really wanted to do? Or did he want to sit in an office and crunch numbers?”

Saleh is of Lebanese decent. He grew up in Dearborn, Michigan, home of the largest concentration of Arabs in the world outside of the Middle East. His dad, Sam, owns the furniture store, a demolition company and a bank.

“My dad chased money,” Saleh said. “He always wanted to coach football, but he didn't. I wanted to coach, and I talked about it with our head coach at Northern Michigan, but afterward I just went home.”

That was before 9/11. After 9/11, Saleh quit his job at Comerica and became a defensive assistant at Michigan State. Four years later, he was coaching in the NFL.

Now, he's in his first season as a defensive coordinator. And Sunday, he faces his mentor, Seattle Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll. Carroll hired Saleh as a defensive quality-control assistant in 2011 and together they won a Super Bowl in 2013.

“There wasn't anything Robert did that wasn't first class and right on point,” Carroll said. “No indications of anything other than he was going to be in this position eventually. He was prepared to do this and he's doing a really fine job with it.”

In Seattle, Carroll helped Saleh develop a football philosophy. Saleh calls his philosophy a mission statement.

“I keep it in my office,” he said. “It's ‘A commitment to consistently execute the details required to compete at our greatest level, with loyalty and conviction.'”

What does that mean?

“It means being committed to not only my family, but the people I'm working for and the people counting on me to do a job.

“Being consistent in my message day in and day out. Not double talking.

“Being very detailed. I try to go overboard in detail so there is zero gray area in what we're asking a player to do.

“Competing. That would be No. 4. Always competing. Everything we do is a competition, from reading a book to driving a car.

“Loyalty. All players really want is for you to give them something that can help them and to show that you care. And the only way you can show that is to be as loyal as possible.

“And then conviction. I will never approach anything unless I'm completely convinced that it's the right thing to do.”

In addition to instilling this code, Carroll helped Saleh develop a system.

“The whole scheme is built on the premise of having strong convictions in what you want,” Saleh said, “having an identity of what you are and giving the players enough looks that they can actually get good at what you're asking them to do.

“We don't do a lot. We play simple three-deep zone, some man-to-man coverage and a little curveball here and there. Players, just by nature of doing the same thing over and over again, will get good at it naturally. They start to understand what teams are trying to do to them because there are only so many ways you can attack our system.

“Once they're not worried about what their schematic job is, and when they're not worried about what their fundamental technique is, they only have one more thing to worry about - the offense.”

Five teams currently use this scheme - the 49ers, Seahawks, Chargers, Jaguars and Falcons. The scheme has been successful on each team. Here is Gus Bradley, defensive coordinator of the Chargers, on Saleh:

“Robert has done a great job everywhere he has been at. The first time I met him he was with the Houston Texans. We hired him with the Seattle Seahawks. And his growth that took place in Seattle, being in that system for a number of years, led me to hire him at Jacksonville.

“And at Jacksonville he did a great job with the linebacking crew, and his overall input on game planning led me to believe that there was no doubt he was ready to take the next step. And the opportunity he has at the 49ers, I know that each day, each week and each year that he's there, that team will improve on defense because that's his past history.”

But, the Pete Carroll- Gus Bradley-Robert Saleh scheme would be irrelevant if the players didn't play hard. And Saleh's players play hard, which you wouldn't expect from a team with a 1-9 record.

“We have our standard, our style of what we're trying to accomplish,” Saleh said. “There's the violence that we want to play with, the effort that we want to play with and, of course, a team that constantly attacks the ball. That's our style.

“We consistently show them what it looks like versus what it doesn't look like. And when the players can hold themselves accountable to a standard, that's when it becomes contagious, and that's when you get a team that can play really hard.”

No one embodies Saleh's ferocious defense more than rookie linebacker Reuben Foster. Foster comes from the University of Alabama, where he played under Nick Saban, one of the best football minds in the world.

What does Foster think Saleh brings to the table?

“Confidence and poise,” Foster said. “He brings attitude. He brings love to the sport. Passion. He makes you want to go out there, just how he talks about the game. He comes to you in a professional way. And it's so smooth, to the point where I want to do this for you, Coach, because of how you said it to me. It's business. I love that about him.”

Saleh already has improved the defense. Last season, it ranked dead last against the run. This season, it ranks 14th of 32 teams.

What does Saleh think he brings to the table? How does he get his players to play hard?

“That's a tough question,” he said. “You can be a rah-rah guy. You can be hard-nosed. You can be whatever you want. Tony Dungy is one of the most soft-spoken human beings in the world, and he got guys to play out of their minds.

“There are a million ways. That was something Pete always stressed - never be afraid to represent your style. You have to be authentic. My players know where my heart is.”