Matthew Coller
EAGAN — Charlie Frye was still trying to stick in the NFL when he got his first offer to coach. It came from his former teammate Kenard Lang, who was coaching at Jones High School in Florida.
At first, Lang pitched the idea of Frye working with his quarterback. Not long after that, the ex-linebacker had another request: “Can you call plays?”
Frye wasn’t ready for that yet. He wanted to keep playing. Frye set records at Akron, won Senior Bowl MVP and started 23 games under center in the league. He wasn’t ready to walk away at 31 years old.
But the league decided for him. Frye had workouts with nine teams and felt that he was performing well enough to land a gig. It didn’t set in for him until Miami Dolphins GM Jeff Ireland told him that a tendon injury that he had suffered with the Oakland Raiders was keeping teams away.
“You were the best guy here, but I can't sign you because if you get hurt, then it falls on me,” Ireland told him.
That’s when he knew he wasn’t going to start in the NFL again.
Sometimes life has a way of telling you what you need, rather than what you think you want.
Frye’s inability to land another quarterback gig ultimately sent him down a coaching path that landed him with the Minnesota Vikings as a key staff member on the No. 1 defense in the NFL. He’s bringing a unique perspective to mastermind Brian Flores’ meeting rooms that Flores says he wishes he had before. Players say that his voice is invaluable when preparing for opponents. They feel his presence is a cheat code.
Frye’s journey to holding a significant role with the Vikings’ defensive staff began when he was still in the NFL. In 2007, the Cleveland Browns started him on opening day but benched him for Derek Anderson in the middle of the game. Anderson caught fire and ended up making the Pro Bowl that year, so the Browns decided to trade Frye to the Seattle Seahawks.
While he was in Seattle, Matt Hasselbeck and Seneca Wallace were the No. 1 and 2 quarterbacks, making Frye QB3.
“You provide value by helping the starter [as QB3],” Frye told Purple Insider this week. “I was introducing Mississippi mud to the footballs, making [film] cut-ups and doing anything I could just to make [the starter’s] life easier.”
When he went to the Raiders in ‘09, he suffered the injury that ended his career and landed on injured reserve. Head coach Hue Jackson asked him to stay around the team and help in the QB room.
“I would help them game plans on, try to give them some shot plays or chunk plays, whatever I could do to help,” Frye said. “So that gave me my first taste of it.”
Once he started helping out Lang at Jones High School in 2012, Frye started to realize that this coaching stuff might be for him. He spent 2014 and 2015 with Wekiva High School in Florida and then his coaching career got serious when he accepted a position at University of Florida as the director of player development.
“I was like, ‘oh, I'm just gonna do this,” Frye said. “It just sucks you in. My first love has always been football. As a young player I fell in love with the game. I feel like it's always going to be a part of my life.”
Once Frye caught the coaching bug, he was all in.
In 2018, he coached receivers at D-II Ashland in Ohio. In 2019 and 2020, he worked as Central Michigan’s offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach. He was pushing to learn as much as he could, wherever he could. It was Frye’s competitiveness that drove him from place to place.
“As a player, you have this fire that's inside you that you desire to be one of the best,” Frye said. “You think when you get done, it's just easy to extinguish. I was never able to really put that fire out.”
The ironic thing about Frye bouncing from city to city with the aim to keep competing is that the coaching life isn’t exactly his comfort zone. Frye grew up in the more-cows-than-people town of Willard, Ohio. There is exactly one other NFL player who came from Willard — that was Red Davis, a tailback for the 1933 Portsmouth Spartans. Frye’s wife, he says, is actually much more comfortable traveling from place to place because she grew up with her family moving around. His kids have adopted that life.
“My kids are so resilient, and they are so much more open than I was,” Frye said. “It's easy for them to strike conversation and bounce back from things and fit in as a new kid. I think those challenges for them will help them as they grow older.”
In 2021, Frye found himself back in the state of Florida. Frye worked as the quarterback’s coach under Flores during a challenging 2021 season that saw Miami grind out a 9-8 season despite injuries to starter Tua Tagovailoa. While they were in Miami, Flores mentioned the idea to Frye of getting a quarterback on his defensive staff.
Clearly Frye left an impression on Flores because after Frye spent one season at Penn State (2022) and two at Florida Atlantic (2023-2024), Flores decided he was the guy to bring a quarterback’s eyeballs to his defense.
“I’d been asking [Kevin O’Connell] about getting a quarterback in our room just as somebody for me and us to just throw questions at,” Flores said. “It’s his background especially being a quarterback in the NFL and a coordinator before and he’s worked with quarterbacks. For myself and for our players, it’s, ‘what’s the read here? Is it left or right? Is [pass protection] to the back, away from the back? What are the reads? What’s the protection here? What are they trying to do? What are they going to do next if we do this?’”
I wasn’t able to get through my entire question to Frye about whether he was hesitant to take on a job on the defensive side of the ball before he stopped me and started talking about pressures versus pass protections.
“Going into it was a lot of excitement and an opportunity to learn,” Frye said. “You play quarterback in the NFL and you're like, ‘yeah, I did all this, man.’ Alerts versus Blitz etc. And you think you have a good understanding of defense. Really, you're just on the top surface of it. Yeah, there's so many more layers to really understanding defense.”
The way things work on a weekly basis is that the assistants have different roles in building the defensive gameplan. Safety Josh Metellus pointed out, for example that defensive line coach Ryan Nielsen is in charge of the run defense. So he presents the week’s run D gameplan to the players each week. They work collaboratively on the blitzes, situational calls, coverages with the players.
And they all work with Frye.
“They bounce stuff off me,” Frye explained. “‘Hey, how would the QB see this? How are they gonna protect this? Are they alerting the run because of the safety?’ All those questions that you talk about in offensive meetings.”
Frye said that he’s often confirming things that the coaches or players already expected in terms of how they are anticipating blitzes to be blocked up by the offense or quarterbacks to attack their coverages but it gives “more confidence” to the players and coaches to know that they’re seeing it correctly.
“It’s been fantastic,” Flores said. “I feel like I missed the boat not doing this years ago.”
The Vikings’ defense is filled with high-IQ players who have been in Flores’ defense for multiple years and who understand the X’s and O’s of defense incredibly well. It’s not easy to find something that they don’t already know. But Frye understands the fundamentals of how offenses are going to try to solve Flores’ intricate pressures.
“You’d be crazy to sit there and try to game plan every single look we throw out there on a Sunday, so teams have to do specific things, and Charlie’s been able to help us see that and see what their mindset is behind that,” Metellus said. “I think it’s been amazing.”
Linebacker Blake Cashman said that he’s been impressed that Frye learned the ins and outs of the defense considering he wasn’t on that side of the ball. It would be good enough to have his QB’s perspective but he also helps write up the scout team plays against the defense because “he knows where offenses can hurt us.”
“He has a brilliant offensive mind to understand our defense as a whole,” Cashman said.
Metellus has seen that part come to life more in Year 2 in Minnesota.
“Being his multiple years now in on this team, in our room, he’s feeling more comfortable, and I think we’re starting to see that, him helping the room, in terms of when he goes up to talk about what’s going on, and how does that help us?” Metellus said. “He talks from a quarterback’s perspective, but he’s speaking to us, so he understands that he’s been in the defensive room. He been in a meeting with Flo. He knows what we do as a defense.”
The more players you talk with about Frye’s role, the more layers to his impact that you see. Veteran outside linebacker Andrew Van Ginkel talked about the ex-QB giving them insight on how opposing quarterbacks are snapping the football.
“He can get us right with [the opponent’s] cadence, their tempo and when they’re on the ball and different things the quarterback’s looking for,” Van Ginkel said. “You have an offensive mind that knows their terminology and different concepts and different things that they are going to hit us with and what to expect. Just allows you to play with anticipation and kind of see things that might not normally see.”
For Van Ginkel, who has been with Flores for the majority of his career, Frye’s presence on the coaching staff is indicative of something bigger: An overall philosophy to seek out any possible edge to enhance his side of the ball.
“Flo’s always thinking outside the box, and he’s trying to find the little advantage in any way possible,” Van Ginkel said.
The reason it works on the NFL’s best defense, Frye said, is the overall ethos of Flores to never stay in neutral. Always shape shifting.
“There’s really no boundaries, no walls, no floor, no ceiling, as far as what he can do,” Frye said. “It’s so personnel based. Who are who are my players, and how can I put them best into situations to have success? The staff’s ability to take those visions and apply them really makes it a pretty unique defense. He can mold week to week, game to game, half to half. His ability to adjust in game in game time is really, really special.”
Frye’s work also extends to the practice field, where he can still spin it. He estimates he throws about 40 interceptions per week helping the defensive players warm up as they work on making plays on the ball.
He enjoys getting to toss it around every day but for Frye, working with highly intelligent players on a gifted coaching staff has been everything that he could have hoped it would be when he agreed to join the team in 2025. It doesn’t just scratch the itch of competitiveness, it pushes his curiosity to the max. That’s the dream for a small-town Ohio QB whose life has always been football.
“I'm getting to see a different side of football — I wish I would have had the opportunity when I was younger,” Frye said. “The best thing I could say is it's a blessing to be in there and to work with those guys… hopefully providing value to those guys for opening the door for you.”
It’s certainly providing value. In a copycat league, it wouldn’t be surprising if more teams start bringing quarterbacks to the other side of the ball.
For now, the Vikings are getting a unique advantage, as per usual under Flores.
“He’s just such an important part to our staff and our defensive success,” Flores said. “I love having him here.”
Really cool story and ;yeah, BFlo is a psycho.