EL SEGUNDO, Calif. — The Los Angeles Chargers introduced Chris O’Leary as their defensive coordinator Tuesday, and with that, they unveiled the first NFL play-calling branch of the Jesse Minter coaching tree.
Minter, who spent the past two seasons as the Chargers’ defensive coordinator, took the Baltimore Ravens’ head-coaching job last month. As the Chargers embarked on their D-coordinator search, they clearly were interested in scheme continuity.
The Chargers announced eight interviews, including O’Leary. Three of those were with internal candidates: secondary coach Steve Clinkscale, safeties coach Adam Fuller and edge rushers coach Dylan Roney. They interviewed Zach Orr, who coached with Minter in Baltimore from 2017 to 2020. They interviewed Dennard Wilson, who coached under Mike Macdonald in Baltimore in 2023. Macdonald and Minter coached together for four seasons in Baltimore. The Chargers interviewed only two candidates without apparent ties to Minter: Jim Leonhard and Aubrey Pleasant.
In the end, they hired O’Leary. He is a true Minter disciple. When Minter was hired as Chargers defensive coordinator in 2024, he brought O’Leary on staff as safeties coach. That was just the latest chapter in a longstanding relationship. O’Leary and Minter met in 2010 when O’Leary was a redshirt freshman player at Indiana State and Minter was the secondary coach there. Minter gave O’Leary his first coaching job at Georgia State as a graduate assistant.
“I’ve seen him as a mentor of mine for my entire coaching career,” O’Leary said Tuesday of Minter.
At the end of 2024, after a successful season coaching the safeties with the Chargers, O’Leary left the NFL to take a play-calling defensive coordinator job at Western Michigan. O’Leary said there were “a lot of factors at play” in the decision. The first reason he listed was “family.” According to O’Leary, he leaned on Minter for advice in this process.
“There was just a set of things that happened,” O’Leary said, “and that’s where it took me.”
At Western Michigan, O’Leary reunited with head coach Lance Taylor. O’Leary and Taylor had coached together for three seasons at Notre Dame. In his one season at Western Michigan, O’Leary built a top-10 scoring defense. More importantly, he showed who he wanted to be defensively, and it was the spitting image of Minter’s Chargers scheme, from pre-snap structure to post-snap rotations.
New Baltimore Ravens head coach Jesse Minter speaks at his introductory news conference in Owings Mills, Md., on Thursday. When Minter was hired as Chargers defensive coordinator, he installed Chris O’Leary as safeties coach. (Rob Carr / Getty Images)
“There was a lot of crossover,” O’Leary said. “From leaving L.A., stepping foot in Kalamazoo, we implemented a defense that was very similar.”
O’Leary said he would send “novels” to Minter each week breaking down what happened in that week’s Western Michigan game. On Wednesdays, O’Leary said, he would watch the Chargers game from the previous week.
“I would tag plays, and then we’d show our guys Thursday, Friday,” O’Leary said. “‘Hey, this is what we’re doing, watch the guys at the highest level do it.’”
O’Leary sprinkled in some of the elements he learned in six seasons at Notre Dame while coaching under defensive minds such as Marcus Freeman and Clark Lea.
“But the core philosophy and the fundamentals,” O’Leary said, “are what I picked up here in L.A.”
That included one of the hallmarks of Minter’s culture, what he calls “separators.”
Minter established five separators when he arrived with the Chargers in 2024: ball disruption, tackling, effort and angles, communication and block destruction. Minter views these as the five non-negotiable fundamental components to any good defense. With the Chargers, he assigned one separator to each position coach. And each week, that position coach would present to the entire defense on his separator. In 2024, for instance, O’Leary presented weekly on ball disruption.
The separators gave agency to the position coaches. They established lines of communication from position coaches to players outside of their position groups. They reinforced how the defensive players needed to play — which, to Minter, was just as important as what the Chargers played schematically.
O’Leary brought the separators to Western Michigan, and he said he maintained the same structure as far as position coaches presenting to the defense.
“We tailored some things so it became a little bit more concise,” O’Leary said. “But 100 percent, it’s fundamental defensive football. Wherever you go, that’s Step 1 of creating an elite defense.”
Western Michigan allowed 17.4 points per game in 2025, and O’Leary experienced how to build and call a defense for the first time.
“The experience to call plays was incredible because what you learn is there’s a flow state to calling plays,” O’Leary said. “You have to have a plan for field zone, situations, the style of play from the offense, how the (opposing offensive) coordinator likes to call the game. And so just being able to do that, it’s almost like you’re in a lab as you’re going through that.”
O’Leary gained a defined understanding of how an emphasis on fundamentals impacts game-day performance.
“The standards that you demand, that separators that we apply, all of those things show up in the game, and you can’t get it back,” O’Leary said. “You can’t just all of a sudden flip a switch and say, ‘Hey, we want to be violent and fast, and we want to play square, and we want to get off blocks,’ because you have to have built that in through the week of prep and through fall camp and all those things. So that was a big learning point for me, and that constant demand that we applied as coaches to the players.”
Here is how Minter described the impetus for the separators when he spoke with The Athletic over the summer: “Just being demanding of how we wanted to play.”
O’Leary was initially recruited to Indiana State as a quarterback. During a redshirt year in 2010, O’Leary was the scout team quarterback. Minter was coaching the defensive backs. His father, Rick, was the defensive play caller.
“They knew I was going to be a coach when I would talk back to them in scout team when I would throw a couple touchdowns,” O’Leary said. “I would be talking trash to Rick and Jesse, and so that’s kind of where they saw the competitive fire.”
Minter was promoted to defensive coordinator in 2011, a position he held for two seasons. In 2013, Minter left to be defensive coordinator at Georgia State. O’Leary graduated in 2014. In 2015, Minter hired him as a defensive line graduate assistant at Georgia State. In 2016, O’Leary moved to defensive backs GA. That year, Rick Minter reunited with his son and O’Leary, coaching Georgia State’s defensive line.
“Fell in love with defense there,” O’Leary said.
The staff got fired after the 2016 season. Minter went to the Ravens as a defensive assistant. Rick took the D-coordinator job at Florida Tech, and O’Leary got his first non-GA job as Rick’s safeties coach. O’Leary then joined Notre Dame in 2018.
“I knew they were great defensive coaches,” O’Leary said of the Minters. “I knew they had the competitive insanity that I have.”
O’Leary now returns to the Chargers, and he has been identified as the best coach to continue what Jesse Minter started in Los Angeles.
O’Leary was paramount in building Derwin James Jr.’s role in 2024. That year, James played more nickel, and he returned to All-Pro form. O’Leary said the role was rooted in “clarity equals velocity.”
“So if we give him more clarity, he’s going to play faster,” O’Leary said.
This is evidence of O’Leary’s vision, relationship-building and interpersonal skills. James took a step back under the previous regime because there was too much on his plate. Minter and O’Leary changed the trajectory of James’ career by tailoring a role to his strengths.
Hiring a coordinator with O’Leary’s minimal experience is a gamble. But it is a logical gamble.
The Chargers lost Jesse Minter. To replace him, they went to Jesse Minter’s tree.
“I have the confidence in myself that the foundation of this defense, what makes this defense special and different, I own those areas,” O’Leary said. “I feel I have a mastery of those areas, just through my relationship with Coach Minter, through being in this building, through working with Derwin. The things that separate us, I feel really strongly about those and what it takes to evolve those and really elevate those.”