Now that Fangio is head coach of the Broncos, he's still thinking of the players first. That's why he sees the Bears continuing their defensive dominance under new coordinator Chuck Pagano, who was hired in January as Fangio's replacement.
"He’ll do fine," Fangio said at the NFL Combine on Wednesday morning. "The players haven’t changed, and the players are the most important thing. Chuck will do fine with those guys. There will be some carryover as there are from a lot of systems. But I don't think they'll have problems."
The Bears chose Pagano as their replacement for Fangio in part because of the similarities in their scheme. Pagano has also operated a 3-4 base defense and worked with Fangio in Baltimore in 2011. Upon his arrival to the Bears, Pagano committed himself to fitting the scheme to his players as opposed to fitting the players to his scheme.
Many of those Bears players, the veterans who always credited their coordinator, were quick to call Fangio when he left for his new job in January. It marked the first head coaching opportunity for the 60-year-old Fangio and was something he had strived to accomplish during a career now in its fourth decade.
For Fangio, the hardest part of leaving the Bears was saying goodbye to those players.
"You don't always have the synergy, the camaraderie of coach and player as we had there," Fangio said. "You can't produce that. It just happens over time."