Three noteworthy Steve Spagnuolo nuggets from his interview in Italy

Last month, Kansas City Chiefs defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo participated in an event called Venom Camp. Spagnuolo, along with the Chicago Bears coaching staff, travelled to Italy to participate.

Fan Source Network’s Rachel Coltz had an opportunity to speak with Spagnuolo, whom she asked about his new role with the Chiefs and working with Andy Reid, among other things.

One item included the challenge of going up against Patrick Mahomes each day during offseason workouts.

“Yeah, that’s a challenge!” Spagnuolo said, via Coltz. “We got a little bit lucky because Travis Kelce was hurt, Tyreek Hill was not there for the spring, and we know how talented they are. Going against a quarterback like that everyday, though, makes us a lot better; when good people can play against other good people, they just elevate each other. So the guys in defense embrace that and they like the competitiveness on the field.”

Spagnuolo added a lot of the players on his side of the ball impressed him during camp.

“We brought new players like Frank Clark, Tyrann Mathieu, a couple of new corners in, a couple of DBs, the D-line is great with players like Alex Okafor, who is a real good surprise, so hopefully we can mix and match all of those guys and come up with something good.”

I noted that the Chiefs probably felt that they found a contributor in Okafor in my mandatory minicamp observations. Okafor might have had best defensive play of the offseason when he intercepted Mahomes on day two of minicamp.

Spagnuolo also downplayed the Chiefs’ switch to the 4-3 from the 3-4 in the interview.

“I don’t know if that will be a lot different,” he said. “The whole thing about the 4-3 or 3-4 defense really pertains to base defense, and in today’s football we don’t play a lot of base defense, we usually have a lot of what we call sub defense, with nickel and dime, I think a great number of defenses in the league play that way 70% of the time. So everybody is kind of playing the same way.”

That is probably as good a note as any to remember with Chiefs training camp coming up next month. The players we see in the nickel defense should almost be considered this year’s starters.

Check out the full Spagnuolo Q&A here.