The Chargers are turning to a familiar name to guide their defense.
Chris O’Leary, who worked as the Chargers’ safeties coach in 2024 under coach Jim Harbaugh before spending 2025 as the defensive coordinator at Western Michigan, was named the Chargers’ defensive coordinator on Wednesday night.
O’Leary helped guide Western Michigan to a 10-4 record and the Mid-American Conference championship. His defense ranked ninth in the Football Bowl Subdivision and was second in the MAC in scoring defense (17.4 points allowed per game).
Before his stint with the Chargers, O’Leary spent six seasons coaching in different roles at Notre Dame, eventually becoming a defensive backs and safeties coach. He worked under former Chargers defensive coordinator Jesse Minter as a graduate assistant at Georgia State in 2014 and 2015. He played at Indiana State as a wide receiver from 2010-14.
The Chargers allowed just 17.7 points per game — the best mark in the NFL — under O’Leary and Minter in 2024. Led by safety Derwin James Jr., the Chargers had a 75.9 passer rating when targeted, third among NFL safety units in 2024.
The question is whether O’Leary can replicate the success Minter achieved en route to landing a head coaching job with the Baltimore Ravens.
After working together to win a national title at Michigan, the Minter-Harbaugh combination revived a Chargers defense that struggled under previous coach Brandon Staley. Inheriting a team that ranked 28th in yards allowed per game (363) and 24th in points allowed per game (23.4) in 2023, the Chargers moved up to 11th in yards allowed (324) and first in points allowed per game in 2024. Last season, the team was fifth in yards per game (285.2) and ninth in points allowed (20.0).
Helping O’Leary’s cause? Most of the Chargers’ top defensive players are returning.
The team has an estimated $80.5 million in salary-cap space, according to Overthecap.com, and general manager Joe Hortiz said he’s planning to use it. In their first big move of the offseason, the Chargers re-signed Teair Tart to a three-year contract Monday, keeping their anchor on the defensive line.
Re-signing outside linebacker Odafe Oweh will be among the Chargers’ priorities, especially if pending free agent Khalil Mack opts for retirement.
When Gary Patterson resigned as coach of Texas Christian in October 2021, midway through his 21st season with the Horned Frogs, the now-65-year old coach decided to take a step back and reevaluate where he and the college game were headed.
“I’d had a job since I was 9 years old,” Patterson said. “Just kind of wanted to take a break.”
For decades, football had been at the forefront of his and his family’s life, so much so that his wife joked she was merely his “mistress.” He wanted to spend time with her, with his grandkids. Plus, after a few seasons, he knew he’d be eligible for the College Football Hall of Fame, which was important to him.
Patterson ended up filling that time with football, anyway. He watched the game from afar, helping out as a consultant on staffs at Texas and Baylor, even working with Amazon Prime’s football coverage, just to score a subscription to Catapult, all along biding his time for the right opportunity to come along.
It came earlier this month, four years after his departure from Fort Worth, in the form of a text message from USC coach Lincoln Riley, whom he knew from their days coaching across from each other in the Big 12. The Trojans’ defensive coordinator, D’Anton Lynn, had left in late December for the same job at Penn State. Riley needed a replacement.
“He wasn’t going to jump back into this for anything,” Riley said Wednesday. “It had to be the right opportunity, the right kind of place, the right kind of setting. I know he knows and believe he’s found that.”
No one is more invested in that than USC’s head coach. Whether Patterson turns out to be the right fit at the right time for the Trojans may ultimately determine the trajectory of Riley’s future with the program. Patterson will be Riley’s third defensive coordinator in five seasons at USC.
“I think it’s an unbelievable hire by Lincoln,” said David Bailiff, who worked with Patterson at New Mexico and TCU. “For him not to be intimidated with Gary’s background, that all he wants to do is get USC better — a lot of coaches probably wouldn’t hire Gary because he’s been a head coach for so long.”
For Patterson, who never beat Riley in seven meetings while at TCU, it was a particularly ideal partnership.
“Any time that I was ever part of a team that had a great offense and scored a lot of points, we won a lot of ball games,” Patterson said.
Patterson, however, hasn’t been a full-time assistant since the turn of the 21st century. He last served as defensive coordinator under Dennis Franchione, who brought Patterson with him from New Mexico to TCU in 1998. He was promoted to head coach in 2000, when Franchione left for Alabama. A week later, across the country, USC hired Pete Carroll.
That’s how deeply entrenched Patterson was for more than two decades at TCU, where his tenure, by any measure, was a staggering success. Over 22 seasons, Patterson led the Horned Frogs to 181 wins and six conference titles. Throughout, defense remained his calling card. Five different times during his tenure, TCU finished No. 1 in the nation in yards allowed, as Big 12 offenses struggled for years to adjust to his multifaceted 4-2-5 scheme.
But by 2021, while Patterson’s TCU defense had largely remained strong, the luster of his long tenure in Fort Worth had faded. The bottom fell out that fall, as the Horned Frogs started the season 3-5. Informed that he wouldn’t be back the following season, Patterson instead resigned with four games left.
Now he returns not as a head coach, but as a coordinator, a step down that Patterson seemed just fine with when asked Wednesday.
“I love it, to be honest with you,” Patterson said.
The entire landscape of college football has also been turned on its head since Patterson last coached, with the advent of revenue sharing and the rise of the transfer portal. But he didn’t seem all that concerned by those changes Wednesday. Mostly because he doesn’t expect it to affect what USC is asking him to do.
Trojans fans hope Gary Patterson’s hire leads to more of this, when three USC players brought down a Northwestern running back last season.
(Eric Thayer/Los Angeles Times)
“My job is defense,” Patterson said. “I don’t deal with NIL. I don’t deal with all those different things.”
His reputation as a mastermind on the defense certainly precedes him, and at USC, that’s where he’ll be needed most. Bailiff, who worked with Patterson at New Mexico and served as his first defensive coordinator at TCU, said that hisability to diagnose what a defense needs is “superior from any person I’ve ever seen.”
His signature 4-2-5 defense was designed, in part, to allow for such adaptability. With five defensive backs on the field most of the time, Patterson’s scheme is intended to adjust to any offense, allowing for his defense to limit substitutions and match up against most personnel groupings.
That scheme, after four years away from the game, is likely to be different by the time it’s installed at USC. Patterson said he plans to marry his original 4-2-5 at TCU with concepts he learned at Texas and Baylor. He also plans to integrate some of what USC’s defense was already doing, with most of the assistants from last season expected to remain on staff.
“Instead of just coming in and saying, well, ‘This is how we’re going to do it,’” Patterson said, “it’s been a little bit more work of trying to put it all together.”
It’ll be up to Patterson to put it all together on USC’s defense, which in four seasons under Riley, has never put things together for long.
“Hopefully,” he said, “[I can] be that last piece to help SC get over the bar, get into the playoffs, to bring out a championship.”
