“He kept me from quitting and not playing football, I’ll tell you that right now,” said Meigs, a 42-year-old father and youth sports coach himself. “He sat down and talked to everybody. It didn’t matter if you were a good player or you sucked. He just got involved, and he cared.”

Now a story about an NFL rookie, a first-round draft pick about the same age as Tomsula was back then. When Jonathan Allen went through his draft process last spring, every coach he met with brought up football strategy. Except one.

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“All the other coaches wanted to talk to me about Xs and Os; he didn’t give a damn about it, he just wanted to really just get to know me,” Allen said of Tomsula. “He was just talking to me. I was like, ‘Huh.’ It was different. It was a change of pace.”

And now a note about the Redskins’ defensive line. Over the last two seasons, Washington allowed opposing teams to rush for an average of 4.7 yards per carry, the worst total in the league. Through three games this season, that number sits at 3.2, seventh-best in the NFL. Want to ask a player for a potential explanation?

“Tomsula,” said Vernon Davis, who played in San Francisco for years when Tomsula coached the 49ers’ defensive line. “He’s making an impact. That’s what he does. He’s good, no matter how you want to look at it. I mean, you can take the guys that you had last year or whatever: Put Tomsula in there; he’s going to make a difference. He’s a difference-maker.”

It seems too simple to attribute all this to the team’s new D-line coach, and maybe it is. Washington landed Allen, a high-first-round talent who slipped to the Redskins at No. 17. They brought in tackling cyborg Zach Brown, who’s second in the NFL in that category. The defense has been healthy; the talent pool on the line is deeper; and Washington has largely played with the lead. It has been just three games. Really, it has been just three games.

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Still, nine months after hiring Tomsula, the team’s line has appeared almost unrecognizable. And it’s hard not to wonder how much of it is due to the man San Francisco Pro Bowler Justin Smith used to call “the best D-line coach in the NFL.” Tomsula coached the San Francisco line from 2007 to 2014; in that lengthy span, the 49ers allowed the second-fewest rushing yards per carry in the league.

Tomsula’s time in San Francisco, of course, ended after that one 5-11 season he spent as the team’s head coach. This came during the turmoil after Jim Harbaugh’s departure, and it made Tomsula famous as the personification of blue-collar footballness, a man who worked his way up through every level of small-time football, who could subsist on crushed whistles and ground playbooks and the scent of dip. It also made him into something of a folk hero among young football fans drawn to vibrant, throwback personalities, and nothing I’ve heard in recent days makes me think that myth is unfair.

Like the time he showed up in San Francisco to interview for the D-line job. Then-executive Scot McCloughan came down to welcome Tomsula and found he had already sweated through his dress shirt. McCloughan brought him into his office, gave him a new shirt and told him to relax.

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Or the way NBC cameras caught Tomsula enthusiastically cursing after a big stop last Sunday night, a moment every player in the Redskins locker room seems to have seen.

“Hilarious,” Allen said. “I wouldn’t expect nothing else from him, honestly.”

“That’s just how he is every day, man. There’s no off button with him,” linebacker Mason Foster said. “That’s what he preaches: Be violent, make it personal. And I think guys have. It’s important to us because it’s important to him.”

Tomsula isn’t big on attention — he turns down most interview requests and declined to be interviewed for this piece — but it isn’t hard to find people who’ll rave about him. Such as former San Francisco nose tackle Ian Williams, an undrafted free agent who became a starter under Tomsula. Williams can still see Tomsula perched behind the quarterback while coaching his brains out, can still hear him reducing entire practices to one single skill (hitting the center’s elbow and wrist with his left hand, for example), can still remember Tomsula asking newcomers how they learned best.

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“Sometimes it takes months or years to figure guys out; he would do it in days or weeks,” Williams said. “He’s so invested and worried about his players.”



Or McCloughan, who — along with Washington defensive coordinator Greg Manusky, another San Francisco expat — helped convince Tomsula to return to coaching with the Redskins after a year away from the NFL. McCloughan, who has known Tomsula since he was coaching in NFL Europe, said the decision was incredibly easy.

“I’m telling you: I’ve been around a lot of coaches, and hands down, he’s one of the best in the NFL,” McCloughan said this week. “He’s just so into it. And the players respect it, because they know he’s sincere. . . . Doesn’t matter if it’s receivers or tight ends or a defensive back, you’ve got to identify how to get to them — which he can do very well. Once he’s in the building, the players are like ‘Dang, he’s trying to help me, I’ll do anything for him.’ “

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Hence that time the 49ers defensive linemen chipped in to buy Tomsula a big-screen TV for Christmas. They put the gift in their meeting room, and when Tomsula walked in and saw it, McCloughan said, he started crying.

“That’s how passionate he is about his guys, and the kind of person he is,” McCloughan said. “I could say this a hundred times over: He’s a really, really good D-line coach, but he’s a better person than he is a D-line coach. He’s tough as s—; there’s no doubt about it, but he’s passionate. If I could draft 11 of those guys on offense, 11 of those guys on defense and special teams, we wouldn’t lose a game.”

Tomsula, still just 49, was in a virtually unwinnable position when he took over for Harbaugh, and maybe he’ll get another shot. It’s also possible that one of his great skills — the ability to rally a small group of men into a loyal and rollicking unit — doesn’t translate to running an entire organization. And it’s also possible that three games is far too early to get excited about a position group that has bedeviled the Redskins for years.

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But those three games have been striking, opening up defensive possibilities that have long been unimaginable. Also striking: how consistently players describe this throwback assistant coach, whether they met him in the last year, the last decade or the previous century.

“I love him. I love playing for him,” said Allen, the former Alabama star. “I’ve only seen probably one guy who’s had a dedication to football as much as he does, and that’s Coach Saban.”

“I can tell you that he’s a wonderful person,” Davis said. “In order to be a great leader, you have to get your guys to love you, and you have to be able to influence them in ways to make them do their job and do their job really well. And he does that.”

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“There’s people that once they become adults, you see ’em 20 years later and it just brings you back. And you say, ‘That’s the same guy I remember,'” said Meigs, the long-ago high school pupil. “You could kind of see, he was a leader — a good guy who cared about doing a good job.”

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