A Defense that does Everything.
This is the second in what I intend to be a series leading up to the new football season. If you missed Part One, you can check it out here! So, with that said, lets get to Part Two of my dreams for the Cougs this fall.
Dream 2: A defense that does everything.
It took a lot of years for me to begin to understand the first thing about football. Sure, I’d heard it all the time. Even repeated it. But I never understood it, not really.
I think part of that is because I’m a big picture thinker. I like to think from big to small. To start with the theory of everything (or as close as I can get) and then find that big brash idea in all the subtle things around me. I think this is why I’ve always been drawn to zone running schemes.
Anyway, this is my excuse for not really understanding the nature of football until well into my late twenties. Because big to small is not how football works. Football is small to big. That’s what all those coaches shouting about details are trying to say. That’s why your high school coach made the whole team repeat that gasser, or ladder, or whatever simply because some sophomore had their foot over the line, or because some lazy senior didn’t get down and touch the cone. Football is a game of little things adding up to big things.
Think of it like a 10,000-piece jigsaw. The point isn’t so much that the specific detail on any given piece is that important, they’re all so small that if one thing is a bit off you’d never notice it. It’s just that everything is a specific piece. So you can’t let stuff go just because it’s small, because, well- everything is small. If even a tenth of the pieces are just a bit off, the whole puzzle will end up looking like it was generated by AI.
Fine, but like, you know….off. So you can’t really let anything go.
Think about it, for a defense to get a sack often comes down to a safety being in the right place, a linebacker actually shoving the crossing tight end, a defensive tackle taking the right angle so that the defensive end has room to bend just enough to get to the quarterback the millisecond before he throws the ball, rather than the millisecond after. In all seriousness, if any one of those four people do their job 15% worse than they actually did, the sack doesn’t happen.
Last time I talked about branding. About identity. That is a big idea, but like every big idea in football it’s an output, not an input. A defense that creates turnovers is an identity. A defense that tackles well is a brand. But both of those things require eleven people to do a series of small tasks well, at the same time, again and again and again and again.
Honestly, it’s not even eleven guys. It’s the eleven guys on the field, and it’s the seven others who play regularly. It’s also the 15 guys on scout team that keep them honest all week and help them time things up before the game. It’s also the coaches getting them the right scheme, and teaching them the right technique, and giving them productive feedback on their execution.
It’s also their winter and summer conditioning, making sure everyone is that quarter step faster, or that half inch more bendy.
It’s everything. Always. All at once. That’s football.
Even more so, that’s defensive football. When you have to react, rather than act, you must have your details together. Be in the right place to start. Execute the technique that allows you to react quickly to what the offense presents. Know your rules better than you know your favorite song, as the rules will change based on what the offense decides to do.
This all meshes better over time. The more reps guys have with each other, the easier it is to all sing on key. Unfortunately, with the Thanos portal shuffling linebackers in and out of our team, graduation/the NFL finally coming for stalwarts like Ron Stone Jr., Brennan Jackson and Chau Smith-Wade, and a whole new set of opponents with different schemes, settings, and travel schedules, the 2024 Cougs have a lot of previously unseen pages to all get together on. Which brings me to my second dream for the Cougs this year: that the defense works on everything, always, all at once. That they find a way to debug their defense the way a professional game tester debugs the latest edition of Call of Duty. Constant vigilance.
I’ll leave you with a few things to look out for, so you can tell if we’ve got a defense that is well prepared to fight the dark arts.
1) The score. Fundamentally, the easiest way to tell if the inputs are good are the outputs. A defense that doesn’t give up many points is probably doing something right. That said, be aware of the role the offense and special teams plays in that. If there is a special teams touchdown, a pick six, or a turnover in the red zone that puts a defense on its own 10 yard line to start you should probably discount those points from your evaluation of the defense’s process. Score can be fluky though, so you should also watch out for how they play. Which brings me to…
2) There should be a lot of group tackling. A defense with everyone doing everything all at once should have two or three people close to the tackle almost every play. Even solo tackles shouldn’t look particularly lonely in the moment.
3) It should feel claustrophobic. A well schemed and executed defense should feel like a whale swallowing a wayward profit. No ball carriers in open space. Running holes that collapse in on themselves. The works.
4) A lot of ‘almost’ big plays. For every sack, interception, or tackle for loss there ought to be three times you got halfway up off your couch only to sit back again. Think about it a bit like golf. When someone is striking the ball well, they have a lot of birdie putt opportunities. They don’t always go down, but if you’re in the position enough some of them are gonna start to fall.