Cincinnati Bengals defensive coordinator Lou Anarumo grew up a die-hard Giants fan in the Castleton Corners section of Staten Island.
He vividly remembers watching the Giants’ 27-21 wild card win over the Eagles at Philadelphia’s Veterans Stadium on television on Dec. 27, 1981, a victory led by quarterback Scott Brunner and running back Rob Carpenter.
“It was starting to turn a little bit. That’s when I was all in,” Anarumo, 55, told the Daily News on Thursday. “Then Bill Parcells took over. I loved it.”
When the Giants hired Anarumo to coach their defensive backs in 2018, he and his wife decided their kids would stay in school in Miami, where he’d coached the Dolphins’ DBs the previous six years.
So Anarumo’s short-term housing solution for his lone New York season was to crash at home. It was surreal.
“I go back into the same room I grew up in, where I used to have Lawrence Taylor posters, Phil Simms, and now I’m driving to work to work for the Giants,” Anarumo recalled. “You talk about being pretty cool? It was unbelievable.”
Maybe not as unbelievable as turning around the Bengals, though, which is exactly what Anarumo has helped do during his three seasons in the AFC North.
The Bengals (7-4), led by head coach Zac Taylor, are staging a revival with offensive stars Joe Burrow and Ja’Marr Chase deservedly atop the marquee of the conference’s fifth playoff seed.
The team’s backbone, however, is a stout and underrated defense led by Anarumo, a 1990 Wagner College graduate who is generating some head coaching buzz in league circles.
Entering Sunday’s game against the L.A. Chargers (6-5) at Paul Brown Stadium, the Bengals are allowing the sixth fewest points per game (20.5) and by no coincidence are sixth in the NFL point differential (plus-83). That puts them in an elite class ahead of the rest of the pack, with the Indianapolis Colts (plus-57) a distant seventh.
Most impressively, they are 3-1 in their division. They’re allowing an average of nine points per game in their wins over the Pittsburgh Steelers (twice) and Baltimore Ravens. And they’ve swept the Steelers for the first time since 2009.
“It’s really complementary football. We’re getting ahead on people, and we’ve got some good rushers and they’re able to rush,” Anarumo said, crediting the offense first. “Then we’re able to force takeaways and it all works together. And we’re in the third year of the system. We have some guys who have been in it for all three, but most of them are new and have bought into it and learned what to do right away. It’s been great.”
Cincy’s free agency class has been the key to vaulting their defense from competitive in 2020 to impressive in 2021, led by edge rusher Trey Hendrickson (Saints), corners Chidobe Awuzie (Cowboys) and Mike Hilton (Steelers), and defensive lineman Larry Ogunjobi (Browns).
That’s on top of the Bengals signing strong safety Vonn Bell (Saints) and tackle D.J. Reader (Texans) a year ago.
“I gotta say: we’ve hit home runs,” Anarumo said. “They’ve exceeded expectations in all facets: as men, as people that want to do things the right way and bring leadership qualities because they’ve won.”
Edge Sam Hubbard (seven sacks) and free safety Jessie Bates III, both 2018 draft picks, are the reliable anchors.
Hubbard is a “self-starter” that “nobody’s gonna outwork” who paced the Bengals’ Week 7 shutdown of Ravens MVP candidate Lamar Jackson. And Bates is a “rare, pure free safety” whose tackling is just as good as his range and ball skills.
“He had a big hit on [Steelers running back] Najee Harris, who’s a big son of a b—h, and it was like nothing for him,” Anarumo said.
Still, the Bengals historically have been a doormat. They’ve never won a Super Bowl. They spent three straight years in last place from 2018-20. And they haven’t had a winning record since their last playoff appearance in 2015.
Then they lost edge Carl Lawson (Jets) and corner William Jackson (Washington) to free agency in the spring and released longtime stalwart tackle Geno Atkins. So how did they pivot and improve?
“We looked for the best players but also guys that come from places that have won,” Anarumo said. “How do you change a culture that hasn’t won? You bring in guys that are used to winning. We did the same thing in the draft. Talent is first, but we tried to look for captains, leadership qualities, things that say you’re getting good players but also good people that can build the quality and character of your locker room.”
Hilton was the latest veteran to take the lead, addressing his Bengals teammates the night before last week’s 41-10 win over his former Steelers.
“I want to talk to the defense,” he told his defensive coordinator.
“That doesn’t happen,” Anarumo said. “And it’s not a Knute Rockne speech, but it’s, ‘Here are the things I know from when I was at Pittsburgh that helped us to get to the next level.’”
Hilton then returned an interception 24 yards for a touchdown in the game. It was the Bengals’ second straight win, an important rebound from two bad outings against the Jets and Browns prior to their Week 10 bye.
“It wasn’t, ‘Oh my God, nobody knows what we’re doing, the sky is falling,’” Anarumo said of the Bengals’ blip. “It was, ‘We didn’t tackle great, we had a couple missed assignments, we have to tighten it.’ We told them to come back ready to go and they did. Now we’re gonna lean on all these guys here because these last six games, every game’s like a playoff game.”
Hendrickson has 10.5 sacks and seven tackles for loss. He and Hubbard “do everything together” off the field and have translated that chemistry to games.
“Two weeks in a row, Trey’s had a sack and Sam’s picked it up,” Anarumo said.
Awuzie is “big and tough” and has been a lynchpin of Anarumo’s coverage plan.
“I’ve been putting him on the other team’s best receiver every week, and he’s done really well,” Anarumo said.
Ogunjobi is “disruptive.” And second-year linebacker Logan Wilson out of Wyoming leads the team with four interceptions and “runs the ship,” wearing the green dot in the middle of Anarumo’s 4-2-5 scheme.
“He was our third round pick last year, and he’s played above that,” Anarumo said.
Former Giants Eli Apple and B.J. Hill are also producing, and ex-Giant captain Michael Thomas signed up recently, too.
Apple has more “confidence” playing around a lot of former Ohio State teammates and has made “huge” interceptions in the last two games. And Anarumo said of Hill, who has four sacks: “I had him as a rookie [in New York], and this is the B.J. I remember.”
Anarumo, the architect of the defense, doesn’t take as much credit for his own work.
He cites the great Monte Kiffin, the longtime Buccaneers defensive coordinator, as a friend and mentor who’s taught him a lot. He said his defense is a mesh of what he’s learned at different stops on his journey, including from Kiffin, who interviewed him for Tampa DBs job in 2004.
“I wasn’t ready to get it,” he said Thursday with a laugh.
Anarumo has been a true coaching lifer since he played quarterback and defensive back at Susan Wagner High School in Staten Island, though. He returned to coach his high school’s JV team while still in college.
Then he coached at Wagner, GA’d at Syracuse, and coached at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, Harvard, Marshall and Purdue before breaking into the NFL with Miami in 2012.
Joe Philbin, a former Harvard colleague, hired Anarumo as the Dolphins’ DBs coach that year. And when Philbin got fired in 2015, now-Lions head coach Dan Campbell was promoted to interim head coach, and Campbell made Taylor his interim OC and Anarumo his interim DC.
So when Taylor got tabbed as Cincinnati’s head coach in 2019, he stole Anarumo away from the Giants to run his defense.
“Unbelievable,” Anarumo said of his journey winding back through Staten Island. “By the way, so were the meals every night when I got home when I was coaching with the Giants. Because my mother would say, ‘What do you want to eat?’”
“I was like, ‘Ma,’” Anarumo laughed, “I gotta work.”
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