The only way to stop backs like Herschel Walker is to eliminate their daylight by filling all the gaps.

The term “run to daylight,” made famous by Vince Lombardi through a book named just that, became a mantra for running back coaches across the country. It is also (unsurprisingly) exactly what defensive coaches fear the most — a runningback who can see the hole and run to daylight.

I was a college running back coach for six years in the early and mid 1990s and coached a kid, Rene Ingoglia, who did a bit more than simply havet a cup of coffee with the Buffalo Bills.** I asked him what he saw when he ran the ball and how he always seemed to find the hole. He told me that all he saw were flashes of color and he simply went to the hole where there was no color.

From us defensive coaches, it is up to us to provide a solid wall of color that encompassing every possible hole or gap. Although this seems simple in theory, it is much harder than it appears. Defensive coordinators are confronted with a number of problems.

First lets take a look at the I-formation, the formation of the great running teams of yesteryear. Over the decades the I has produced some of football’s most prolific rushers, including Archie Griffin of Ohio State, O.J. Simpson of Southern Cal, and Herschel Walker of Georgia. Any defensive coordinator worth his salt has to have a plan for the I.

As you can see in the image below, an offense in the I presents seven gaps to defend.

As stated above our goal is to put a player in each gap. The problem is that the gaps are not stationary. Let’s take a look as the offensive lineman come off the ball to our left .All the gaps have moved. Each defensive player must move and still fit into his proper gap. Remember the offense know the snap count, we don’t.

In the diagram below, all our gaps have moved to our left.

In the next figure, we are aligned an under defense, which a common front against teams that have a tight end and two backs in the backfield. Under defense is generally characterized by a linebacker over the tight end, defensive ends aligned in an outside shade on the offensive tackles, a nose shaded on the center to the tight end and a defensive tackle in an outside shade away from the tight end.

The important thing to remember is that it doesn’t matter what front we present to the offense — all gaps must be filled with color. A motto that I picked up from CoachHuey.com is to “play defense, not defenses.” It’s more important that we play well as team than to present a ton of different defensive looks to the offense.

Now that we know our gaps can move, the next thing to consider is that, since the fullback is in the middle of the offensive formation, he can insert himself anywhere along the line of scrimmage to thus create an extra gap for us to defend.

Because the offense is now presenting us with another gap to defend, as shown in the diagram above, we must now add another defensive player to combat this extra gap. This is one of the reasons why the I formation is so deadly. A clever offensive coordinator is going to insert him in most every gap from play to play.

Let’s take a look at how we might defend against an Archie Griffin or Herschel Walker running an isolation play towards the tight end — the strong side of the formation. Remember, although the play might be headed one way, the great runningbacks can expose any weakness and can cut the run back.

In the next diagram, because the fullback creates an extra gap between the offensive guard and tackle the strong safety must come up to fill the extra gap.

Now every gap is filled by a player. The tailback has nowhere to run. Of course, offensive coordinators have pens and pencils too, and once they see that the free safety is flying up to tackle the tailback near the line, they will release the tight end to throw a pass to him at the spot where the strong safety came from.

As a result, a second, and maybe better way, to defend against a strong side isolation run is to bring the weak safety into the picture because he doesn’t have an immediate vertical threat to worry about. In the last diagram below, the weakside (“Will” or “W”) and Middle (“Mac” or “M”) linebackers fill the extra gap created by the fullback.

Now the weak safety must come down and present color in the vacated gap left by the will linebacker. Again, every gap is covered; there is nowhere to run, and now the strong safety can cover the immediate vertical threat presented by the tight end.

In sum, to play great run defense you must  attack your assigned gap, shed blockers, pursue the ballcarrier, and make the tackle.  Play defense, not defenses.

** Footnote: Ingoglia was inducted into the UMass hall of fame, spent time with the Bills, and, in a bit of trivia, scored a touchdown in World Bowl VII of NFL Europe. Lawrence Phillips, the famous Nebraska star and NFL cast off, also scored a touchdown in that game.]

2. Survivor bias on the gridiron. From the Freakonomics blog.

3. Tim Tebow’s loping release. During the broadcast of Florida’s bowl game, Brian Billick showed exactly what is wrong with Tebow’s release: It’s long, he brings the ball down too low (this motion generates no additional power or accuracy), and it exposes the ball both to a fumble and to a defender who might break on the ball. See it here (h/t Doc Sat):

The word I had gotten was that Scott Loeffler, Florida’s quarterback coach, had made significant progress with Tim on this but that come gametime, well, a player’s gotta play how he knows how. And Tebow had earned the right to play his way. Yet it is troubling to the lack of progress, and it will hurt him in the draft. But what if it was worse, than a lack of progress — what if Tebow actually regressed on this point? Check out this video which charts Tebow’s release over time, and you be the judge.

4. “Football Island”:

5. Focus on the Tebow. In other Tebow news, the internets are much abuzz about the possibility of Tebow appearing during the Super Bowl in an anti-abortion ad put on by Focus on the Family:

The former Florida quarterback and his mother will appear in a 30-second commercial during the Super Bowl next month. The Christian group Focus on the Family says the Tebows will share a personal story centering on the theme “Celebrate Family, Celebrate Life.”

The group isn’t releasing details, but the commercial is likely to be an anti-abortion message chronicling Pam Tebow’s 1987 pregnancy. After getting sick during a mission trip to the Philippines, she ignored a recommendation by doctors to abort her fifth child and gave birth to Tim. . . .

Jim Daly, president and CEO of Focus on the Family, said the commercial comes at a time when “families need to be inspired.” . . . “Now that the ad has been shot, we’re excited to tell people it’s coming because the Tebows’ story is such an important one for our culture to hear,” he said.

CBS, which will be broadcasting the Super Bowl, is apparently still deliberating on whether to run the ad. To get it on air Tim may need to appeal directly to a higher power: CBS President Les Moonves.

6. Brian Cook dishes on new Tennessee coach Derek Dooley. Read it here. I don’t have much to add, but one rather silly meme that has gone around is that Dooley got this job simply because “he paid his dues,” as if he would have been hired after two seasons at Louisiana Tech if his name had been Derek McMurphy; being Vince Dooley’s son helps. Now, this doesn’t mean he won’t be successful, or isn’t a good coach, but these big time coaching jobs are akin to winning the lottery, and who you know is always going to be important. If I’m a Tennessee fan I’m fine with it, but I would still be slightly bothered knowing the hire couldn’t totally be chalked up to being based on merit.

On the one side you have Nick Saban’s Alabama squad. On offense, the run game that propelled Mark Ingram to the Heisman trophy involves basically five or six run plays: inside zone, outside zone, power, counter, and sometimes a draw and sometimes a toss play. But it’s the defense that makes ‘Bama go. Of course, I’ve previously written about Saban and his strategies and philosophy:

Saban has been coaching defense – and coaching it quite well – for decades. But there is no question that the defining period of his coaching career was 1991-1994, when he was Bill Belichick’s defensive coordinator with the Cleveland Browns. Just knowing that tells you a great deal about Saban’s defense: he (primarily) uses the 3-4; he’s very aggressive, especially on passing downs; he wants to stop the run on first and second down; he’s not afraid to mix up schemes, coverages, blitzes, and looks of all kinds; and, most importantly, he is intense and attentive to detail, which is the hallmark of any great defensive coach.

…One thing that distinguishes Saban is that he uses pattern-reading in almost all of his coverages, including the traditional Cover 3, whereas many coaches only let certain defenders pattern read or only use it with certain defenses like Cover 4. Sounds a lot like Belichick, no?**

On the other side is Texas and their great quarterback, Colt McCoy. McCoy, who will deservedly be considered one of the great quarterbacks of all time, did not have an overly impressive year. He had some good games but few of those came against top flight opponents. He’ll have to carry the load for Texas, which is something I think a now relatively pressure free McCoy can do. I have previously written about McCoy’s pass game too:

Colt McCoy, University of Texas’s record-setting triggerman (and Heisman hopeful), is known for one thing above all else: his astounding accuracy. . . .

Texas’s favorite route concept, by far, is something known as the “two-man” game, known in some coaching circles as the “stick concept.” Texas runs their a little different, but they also use it a great deal; it’s their number one concept by far. . . .

This concept has been Texas’s go-to route since Mack Brown and Greg Davis arrived. Everyone from Major Applewhite, to Chris Simms, to Vince Young and now McCoy have been asked to master the play.

The concept itself is simple enough…. It can be run from really any formation — any set with at least two receivers to one side — but Texas favors it from sets with at least three receivers, as the diagram below shows. This way the outside receiver can run deep. He serves both as an option on the fade route against single-coverage, but primarily he draws the defense away. And, from a formation and personnel standpoint, he typically draws the other team’s cornerback, allowing the two inside receivers to work against inferior pass defenders — the linebackers, safeties, and nickel backs.

The “two-man” concept itself has one receiver run immediately to the flat, while another bursts upfield to a depth of about eight yards — slightly deeper than most other teams run the route. He can then turn inside or outside depending on where the coverage is pressuring him. He wants to find the crease in the zone and to find the window that gets created as the flat defender widens for the other receiver on the “shoot” route to the flat. Against man coverage, he can break back to the sideline….

…[I]n watching Colt, I see a lot of parrallels with another guy known for his accuracy: Drew Brees. Both have underrated athleticism, both are smart, and both can stick the ball on the receiver, exactly where they want to. That is something that cannot be taught, and it should continue to serve Colt well.

It will be fascinating to see who comes out on top tonight.

**FN: During the Big 12 title game Jesse Palmer kept saying that Nebraska was “pattern reading” Texas’s routes and therefore defeating them. Some bloggers picked up the trail, but although true that Bo Pellini uses some pattern reading, this was not the reason they lost. They lost because Nebraska could blow up pass and run plays with a couple of linemen (Suh!) and swarm everyone else. Texas’s pass game understands pattern reading and is as well prepared for it as you can reasonably be. There are criticisms of Greg Davis but I’m not sure this is one of them.

But, if the job comes for you, there’s really no way you can turn it down unless you have something pretty special lined up, i.e. Urban Meyer at Florida. Indeed, even if success there, under present circumstances, is elusive, the reward remains among the highest that football can offer: immortality. Even Notre Dame’s failed coaches remain part of the public psyche; I don’t remember many of the names who coached Oklahoma during the lean years, but nearly every football fan can recall Gerry Faust. But, rightly or wrongly, winning a national title at Notre Dame ensures your legend.

So I think Kelly was right to accept the job. The more interesting question is whether Kelly was the right ma

n for it. Given the choices this year, I’d say yes. I liked the “fit” of a Gary Patterson more than Brian Kelly in South Bend, but I think he’ll succeed. A few unconnected thoughts:

• In terms of recruiting, Kelly has done an excellent job getting talent into Cincy, and will continue to recruit many of the same areas.
• This might be heresy, but schematically I don’t find Kelly that interesting. Now he’s a spread guy (which plays to my preferences), and he’s been doing it a long time (so he has a pedigree), but I think much of the talk about Kelly as an “offensive genius” is misplaced. He runs a very simple, and even at times simplistic, spread offense. That’s the bad news.
• The good news is that really doesn’t matter. The Irish just got done with a guy who was pretty convinced of his schematic brilliance, and likely the sooner ND can get beyond just winning the scheme battle and win some actual ones on the field, the better. And with this is the fact that Kelly is an excellent teacher, which is what really matters.
• And don’t get me wrong here, his scheme isn’t bad. His staff gameplans very well and they put their kids in position to succeed, which is really all that matters. You’ll see some fun stuff from quads — or with four receivers to the same side — but otherwise everything is pretty basic. Yet I liken it to when Holtz arrived at Notre Dame. No one perceived him as an offensive guru, but for what they did at the time, relative to everyone else in college football (and with some very good players), it was sophisticated enough. I think it will be similar for Kelly: If he gets good players in he’ll do a great job of teaching them, and as a result the offense will succeed.
• Which brings us to probably the scariest similarity with Weis: Kelly needs to find a good defensive coordinator, and I’m not sure who that will be. This need to find an offensive guy to whom that entire side of the ball can be dumped on sort of the Sword of Damocles that hangs over all the offensive obsessed gurus. Charlie Weis never figured it out; Steve Spurrier never won a national title until he got Bob Stoops in as defensive coordinator; Urban Meyer’s first championship at Florida, the championship game last year, and much of his success this year was driven by the great defenses of Charlie Strong (who is now at Louisville); and in the NFL the New Orleans Saints have gone from bubble playoff team to undefeated with the introduction of some new faces on defense and a new defensive coordinator, Gregg Williams.

  So more than any single recruit, I’d want to know who Kelly is going to hire as his DC. Had Weis’s defense been better this year it’s likely that he’d still be in South Bend. (And once you go to the revolving door, it becomes hard to get settled, as it takes awhile to get the program up to speed. It’s hard to transform a defense with a few weeks of spring and fall practice.)

• All this, however, obscures the bottom line: Brian Kelly has won everywhere he has been. He turned Grand Valley State into a title winning team; he resurrected Central Michigan, where Butch Jones has continued much of that success; and in Cincinnati he has led the team to three of the best seasons in school history — maybe the best — in back-to-back-to-back years. I agree with the commentary that Notre Dame is best off hiring a guy who has succeeded at the college level. With Weis I think the goal was to sort of emulate Pete Carroll’s success at USC, but it didn’t work. And the Notre Dame job is fraught with all the issues that plague all college head coaches, but, often enough, on steroids. A little time in the meat grinder can only help.

Hopefully no one takes my criticisms too harshly. As I said, the bottom line is that Kelly is a winner, and there’s no reason to think he won’t be able to do that at Notre Dame. I’ll definitely watch more Irish games next fall.

TCU quarterback Andy Dalton found almost all of his success on the ground on Saturday by employing a new play that the Clemson coaching staff had not seen on film, and Dalton seemed to run almost at will through the line of scrimmage and beyond. . . .

Steele said that the play with Dalton carrying was really the only play the Tigers had not seen on film as they studied the Horned Frogs last week.

“They ran just one play that we hadn’t seen on film – but it was a good one,” he said. When one reporter asked Steele why the zone read was giving his defense so much trouble, Steele explained the difference between a true zone read and what Dalton was running on Saturday.

“Not to get too technical, but on the zone read, the quarterback fakes to the running back going this way and the quarterback goes the other way,” Steele said. “What they were doing was faking zone read one way, the quarterback would step like he was going this way but they would pull the guard and chase it the other way. It was a new look. We got over there and drew it up, got it adjusted out, but we were doing it on the fly and adjusting it on every call.

“I don’t know if it’s just luck or if they are just that smart, but there were a couple of those calls that we really needed something to happen and we didn’t. The ones that were base defense calls against, we got it stopped. But the ones where we were trying to have some pressure and make something happen, we maybe should have just left those calls alone and just base defended it. “

Clemson linebacker Brandon Maye said the play was causing trouble because of TCU spreading receivers across the field.

“They were spreading us out and forcing us to play one linebacker and forcing that one linebacker to play two gaps,” Maye said. “All you can say is they did a good job scheming us up.”

I’m going to disagree with the description of the play as a variant of the zone-read, though all of these plays fall within the same spread option family. Indeed, this is a play I’ve seen Florida and Urban Meyer use before, though the pulling guard is a nice wrinkle. I call it an “inverted veer.”

In the typical veer play from a spread set, the line blocks down and double-teams the defensive linemen on up to the linebackers. They leave the defensive end unblocked (except when they run midline veer, in which case it is a defensive tackle) and read that man. If he steps down for the runningback, the QB just gives the ball and steps around him. It is just the old first-read of the triple option adapted for spread sets.

But TCU ran a variant, one I’ve seen other teams use. They just “inverted” the runningback and quarterback: The runningback runs a sweep or outside zone action laterally. If the defensive end takes him, then the quarterback shoots up inside the defensive end. If the defensive end sits for the QB, the runner should be able to hit the corner. Remember, the defensive end is often the hardest guy to block, and especially so when you want to “reach” him to seal the corner.

In that way I disagree with the characterization of the play as a fake-zone read where the QB then runs back to the other way. You can see the runner is taking a wide angle. That said, I don’t know what TCU’s read was, but this is a play I’ve seen at least for a few years. And again, Meyer uses it at Florida with his fast runners heading outside and Tebow, the better inside runner, going inside. Below is video of TCU using it against Clemson. (Again, thanks to reader Jay Miller.)

Finally, the one wrinkle TCU has is the pulling guard. I think that was just designed to get better blocking at the point of attack, though TCU had them so crossed up he didn’t even end up blocking anyone. This scheme has a lot of similarities with how teams block the shovel play.

I suppose the reason Steele and Clemson had so much trouble with this hinges on what his linebacker’s reads were. I take it they were reading the quarterback and thinking backside with the zone read. If they read the pulling guard, for example, there wouldn’t be an issue with where the play was going. (This is one reason the veer blocking works so well, because the line steps one way and the play hits the other. The pulling guard can give this away.) It is just like on the famous counter trey play: if the linebackers read the pullers there are no issues with stopping it (though they may be weak to some other play), but if they read the fullback blocking away they can get crossed up.

It’s all a cat-and-mouse game. Point in this one to TCU.

- Myles Brand, president of the NCAA, has passed away. There are many sports related obits (including this one from the NY Times), but don’t forget that Brand made serious contributions to his field as a philosophy professor, including “well-known work in metaphysics and epistemology, especially action theory, as a professor at places like Pittsburgh, Arizona, and Illinois/Chicago.”

Rethinking Fourth Downs. From Brian Burke:

Imagine that for decades no one ever thought of the punt. Teams knew nothing else than to run or pass on 4th down. And then one day it’s invented. Some guy comes up to a coach and says, “Kick the ball on every 4th down and the other team gets possession 37 yards further down the field.” The coach would think he was crazy: “Wait, you want me to give up one quarter of my opportunities for a first down on every series…just for 35 yards of field position? Do you realize how much that’s going to kill our chances of scoring?”

[T]hat coach would be absolutely right. . . . Every single serious study of 4th-down decisions has found that, in most situations, teams would be better off by going for the conversion attempt rather than kicking. . . .

. . . I also think it has something to do with what economists call Prospect Theory. In short, almost all people tend to fear losses far more than they value equivalent gains. In this perspective, a punt is considered the “break-even” decision. A failed conversion attempt is seen as a loss, and a successful attempt is seen as a gain. But the loss is feared disproportionately, and the result is clouded decision-making.

- Who does a good job in NFL free agency? Via Pro Football Reference Blog.

- Why are people successful? What motivates? Wilbon:

It’s now a rather famous anecdote in the life and times of Michael Jordan that he was cut from the varsity when he was in high school. You think that’s merely a footnote more than 30 years later? You think Jordan’s forgotten the details or is willing to let go? Guess whom Jordan invited to the Hall of Fame Friday night? Leroy Smith, the kid who took his spot on the high school team. Jordan said he’s still saying “to the coach who picked Leroy over me: ‘You made a mistake, dude.’ “

– A story about quasiparticles. From Gravity and Levity:

Imagine, if you will, that you are an alien from some advanced and distant civilization. You find yourself fascinated by humans, whom you observe from your own planet through an ultra-high-powered telescope. As individuals, you think you know what humans are like: at least you have a sense of their characteristic size and patterns of motion. But you are puzzled by the behavior of large groups of humans. You therefore decide to make a study entitled “the properties of large, densely-packed groups of humans”. You begin your study by turning the gaze of your telescope to the biggest, densest group of humans you can find: the crowd at a football stadium.

The collection of humans inside the football stadium seems at first to be an enormous, chaotic, impossibly-complex collection of individual movements. But after a long period of observation, you see something truly remarkable: the humans begin doing “the wave”. What a startling observation this would be! From 80,000 humans packed together and moving around in a hopelessly complicated mess arises something remarkably simple: a single wave, which moves around the stadium with its own characteristic size and speed. You complete your study by observing “the wave”, writing down laws that describe its size and speed, and trying to predict when and where it will occur in the future.

- “It’s the downside of celebrity without the upside of it.” College athletes under the (social networking) microscope.

- A history of violence. Urban Meyer and Kiffin the Elder have a good relationship. How will that manifest itself when the Son of Kiffin, with Dad in tow, faces the Gators?

- This is unfortunate. “Fatty acids derived from pork bone fat are used as a hardening agent in crayons and also gives them their distinctive smell.” Ugh.

A little late, but I love this. Old media covers from the WizOfOdds.

- Statistical sagas [edited]. The Doc wonders how Georgia beat South Carolina despite the stats; Blutarsky notes that he might not have been paying enough attention to the right ones, and Dawgsports notes that the problem might be in focusing too much on the box score.

A Rand row. Jonathan Chait vs. Will Wilkinson on Ayn Rand.

The [coaching] staff met in the War Room. (In a culture so steeped in tradition, everything has a fancy name.) The mood there always seems part frat house, part locker room, part battlefield HQ. There’s much scathing humor and shit-giving, bro love in its highest form. Around the rectangular wood table are fourteen high-backed leather swivel chairs; each of the coaches takes the same chair every time, with Carroll at the head. Behind them, a hodgepodge of stools and folding chairs for the graduate assistants — some of them former players, some manager types who never played a down. Two walls are dominated by double whiteboards; panels slide to reveal depth charts of players and recruits; another whiteboard lists the name of every offensive play and the number of yards the play averaged last season. With desks occupying two corners and video-projection equipment in a third, the room is tight. Deep into a session you will find some of the larger guys reclining so far back they’re practically in the lap of a GA.

At one minute before seven, one of the GAs walked in with two giant sacks of Egg McMuffins.

“All right!” somebody screamed. “The hockey pucks are here!”

“Pucks!”

“Go Pens!” hollered BC [Carroll's son, an assistant coach].

A feeding frenzy ensued. Large men reached and grabbed for the various bottles of hot sauce and mini containers of jelly that live permanently at the center of the table.

“It’s time to get ready for some football around this muthafucka,” yelled Ken Norton Jr., son of the former world-champion boxer, himself a former All-Pro linebacker. Norton had retired after thirteen seasons when he happened to meet Carroll; things just clicked. Now he’s going into his fifth year with USC. Nobody gives him shit for being a UCLA alum, particularly at noontime basketball, where he’s been known to let out the monster, playing Shaq to Carroll’s Kobe. Since the last NFL draft, when three USC linebackers were scooped up in the first two rounds, people have begun joking that USC, once known as Tailback U, needs to be renamed. Norton’s Egg McMuffin appeared tiny in his giant paw. His rocklike mandible made quick work of it. He helped himself to another.

Carroll entered from his office across the hall, McMuffin in hand. His mouth was full, he was chewing, he was wearing the silly/happy expression of a guy who’s just come to work after his morning surf. “What’s happenin’ boys?”

“A little camp today!” hollered the defensive coordinator, Haruki Rocky Seto, “Rock” to his friends, a second-generation Japanese American named for the boxer Marciano. (His brothers are named after Sonny Jurgensen and Johnny Bench.) An undersized junior-college fullback who made the Trojans as a walk-on, Seto entered the coaching ranks as a video assistant, filming practices. When Carroll came to town for his first USC press conference nine years ago, Rocky was the kid who picked him up at the airport. Now he’s in charge of Carroll’s first love: defense.

“That’s what I’m talkin’ about!” hollered offensive-line coach Golden Pat Ruel (his actual full name). He’s known Carroll since 1977, when they were both graduate assistant coaches making $172 a month at Arkansas. Like most of the veterans in the room, he’d coached in the NFL. He chose to work for Carroll for less money. “How many people do you know who enjoy driving to work every morning?” he’d testimonialized at the chalk talk.

Carroll talks a lot about his coaches “growing up in the program.” He likes grooming his own people instead of bringing in established stars. He is proud of the fact that former assistant coaches, like Lane Kiffin and Steve Sarkisian, who recently departed for Pac-10 rival Washington, have gone on to head-coaching jobs themselves. “I want guys to come to the program knowing that I’ll do everything in my power to get them the job of their dreams at some other place,” he says.

Carroll gulped down the last of his sandwich and took his chair; the GA in charge of statistics fired up the iPod. Carroll ran the meeting briskly, a stylized form of controlled chaos. And then a few final words:

“Let’s come out of our shoes today on these kids, man,” he told his staff. “Let’s just coach the shit out of these guys. I want lots of enthusiasm. I want you frickin’ screamin’ and yellin’ and makin’ ‘em feel it. Make it memorable — but don’t abuse anybody.”

“Dude! You suck! Get the fuck out of here,” bellowed offensive coordinator Johnny “Mo” Morton, who arrived a few years ago from the New Orleans Saints.

“Get off my field!” hollered special-teams coach Brian Schneider, a new hire, fresh from the Oakland Raiders.

“You fuckin’ suck!” hollered BC, never to be outdone in loudness by anyone.

“Let’s not do that,” Carroll said, playing aghast, his tone recalling a guy with a secondary teaching credential, which he has, along with his master’s degree in physical education. “But make sure they feel us. Get ‘em fired up, hustling their ass off. And if somebody gets hurt, don’t throw a fuckin’ fit, hollerin’ for the trainer. Do it cool and calm like we been there before, so we don’t freak anybody out.”

“Unless there’s a fuckin’ bone stickin’ out,” Johnny Mo offered.

“If there’s a bone sticking out, you can frickin’ go crazy!” Carroll hollered, standing to leave.

“Aaaaaiiiiiii,” somebody cried in agony.

“Ohhhhhhhhhaaahhhh,” groaned somebody else.

“Trainerrrrrrrr!”

“Go Pens!” hollered BC.

Carroll was again wearing the shorts with the quarter-sized stain; from behind his sunglasses, he was watching the Category 1 players go through a pass-rushing drill — senior standouts, a couple of promising juniors. Starting in a down stance, each man had to explode off the line, throw a forearm at a large tackling dummy — man-sized with a weighted bottom to make it self-righting — then run around another dummy, then sprint to an orange traffic cone. Carroll’s arms were crossed. The only part of him that was moving was his jaw, furiously working a piece of pink bubble gum. For once, he seemed utterly still.

What are you seeing? I asked.

“When you run around a corner, some guys just naturally plant their toe and swivel — it’s called turning the toe.” He pointed to the kid going through. “That guy can’t do it.”

He watched another. “That guy’s trying to go sideways. He can’t do it, either.”

The next kid slid out, lost his footing, fell piteously to his knees. “See how that one wanted to pick up his foot to turn? You gotta turn the toe to get around a guy,” Carroll said. He planted his toe and swiveled, demonstrating.

“From the discipline and repetition comes the ability to improvise and be creative,” he said matter-of-factly. “If you try to be creative and improvise without the discipline, you have chaos. But once you have the discipline, once you take care of all the details, you can play with it. You gain the ability to add accent, to improvise with trust and confidence, to make it into jazz.”

All around us, huge guys were hollering and grunting and sweating. Bodies collided. Whistles twittered. Large metal sleds were being violently impacted. Carroll crossed his arms, satisfied, and returned to watching, as if from a mountaintop — a crooked, blue-eyed guru behind rose-colored Maui Jims. Find a philosophy for yourself. Compete to become the best you you can be. Work hard enough to transcend. Don’t lose your sense of humor along the way: the Zen of Big Balls Pete.

Just then, somewhere across the field, Carroll spotted something he liked. “Wow!” he exclaimed, his stillness suddenly broken. “Did you see that? That’s a nice move over there.”

And off he went at a trot.

For help I want to thank Art of Trojan Football Analysis and Jerry Gordon for their insights, and the invaluable Brophy for the game film that launched a thousand (or more) words. And for more nitty gritty, TFA has a nice series. See parts one, two, three, and four.

Defenses began reacting by using a technique called a “scrape exchange” to mess up the read. With this defensive adjustment, the defensive end always crashes for the runningback, while the linebacker “scrapes” over to take the quarterback. If the quarterback doesn’t see this, he will pull the ball, thinking he will have an easy lane on the backside, and instead runs straight into the linebacker.

If the offense knows that the defense is shifting to this (a big if), what is the adjustment? Tell the tackle to block the defensive end, and the quarterback to read the linebacker. Often the linebacker will take himself out of the play, and with good blocking, the offense should be able to get a good run play, or a big play if the runner can cut back.

But let’s step back from scheme: what else can a defense do? One answer, is just to get more athletic. As TCU’s excellent coach Garry Patterson recently told the NY Times’s Pete Thamel:

Patterson’s base defense consists of four down linemen, two linebackers and five defensive backs. Many teams have gone away from four-man defensive lines and have added a linebacker for a 3-4 alignment, but Patterson chooses to keep the front stout and the back end of the defense flexible.

It is a simple concept for a complicated challenge.

“You’ve got to spread out with them,” he said. “We try to coach defense like coaches coach offense.”

Patterson’s theories on slowing down the spread quickly come back to speed.

“If the defensive end is fast enough to be able to play the running back or the quarterback instead of some other person on your defense, that frees up a guy,” he said. “If nine guys out of your 11 can run somebody down, it always helps.”

This last quote is the most important. Reconsider the diagrams above. Now, let’s say (a) that the defensive end (or linebacker in a “scrape-exchange” scheme) is a real stud, and (b) that the quarterback is nothing special — not a Pat White or Vince Young. In that case, when the defense sees the zone read the defender being “read” can pretty much just wait until he knows whether the QB or RB is keeping it, and then attack accordingly. Unless the quarterback is a real athletic threat (think of Michigan’s motley quarterbacking crew from last season), that defender can play both the zone-read and not fear having the quarterback run by him; if the QB runs, he’ll get ‘em.

The obvious answer for the offense is to get more athletic at quarterback (like Michigan is trying to do), but there are other things, like amping up the options on the backside reads for the QB if he doesn’t give it to the back. But, as always, the chess match goes on and on . . . .

To 4-3, or not to 4-3?

4-3 vs. 3-4 defense

“. . . .We have the versatility to play in a lot of different fronts, a lot of different packages, whatever is going to give our team the edge. You know, the offense always knows where the play is going and the snap count, so if we can do some different things on defense to help us out in that process, whether it’s the 3-4 or the 4-3, whatever can give us the best chance to win.” . . . .

Does the 4-3 allow him to stand out as a pass rusher?

“It depends on what we’re executing. It isn’t always about sacks, [that)] can be overrated. It’s about getting pressure on the passer, taking care of your responsibilities first. There’s a time and a place for everything. If it calls for us to penetrate, get in the backfield, then that’s what we’ll do. But sometimes we’ll 2-gap, when playing 4-3 front as well. Some teams have different philosophies, where it’s a 1-gap defense, but we still 2-gap and everybody is responsible for two gaps.”

It’s way too early to tell anything firm (I haven’t even been able to watch the Pats this year yet!), but a few points to remember. One, this is not necessarily a huge change in philosophy. Nick Saban, a Belichick protege, has managed to cycle between being a 4-3 and 3-4 guy as his personnel has dictated, without a lot of changes. Second, a big move these days is the rise of the 4-3 “under” look, where the backside defensive end is some kind of “hybrid” guy who can play either outside linebacker or defensive end. That way a team like the Patriots could still basically play with their usual three linemen — Seymour, Wilfork, and Warren — and the hybrid guy could move seamlessly between being a true 4-3 defensive end or an outside linebacker.

Indeed, in the diagram above of a zone-blitz he drops off. Is he a linemen dropping back, or an outside linebacker? It honestly doesn’t matter too much.

The other thing Seymour mentioned was the use of one-gap or two-gap principles. Most 4-3 teams  consider themselves “one-gap” teams, meaning each guy steps to a gap. A lot of 3-4 teams consider themselves two-gap, which means that, say, a nose guard is responsible for the gap to either side of him. In practice they still will play a one-gap because they will step where the linemen are, but this is an important thing when designing a defense and dictating the angles of the linebackers and safeties when they play run. It sounds to me though that Belichick is comfortable moving between the two somewhat, maybe even on the same look. The old 46 defense that Buddy Ryan used with the Chicago Bears was a one-gap defense where the nose guard was responsible for two gaps. It can be adjusted.

Which leads me to believe that Belichick is primarily just looking for more tools in his belt to be able to throw at people later. The offense should be in solid shape, while the defense saw a fair amount of attrition combined with an influx of new guys that will need to be fit in there, somewhere. It will be interesting to watch, for sure.

Hat tip: PatsPropaganda.