I Don’t Get It.

A list of things I don’t understand about the last two weeks

A list of things I don’t get about the last two weeks of Cougar football:

I don’t get why this is considered a collapse by the WSU defense.

We gave up 53 points to SJSU. We couldn’t stop San Diego State. This is who we’ve been. I recognize that we’re giving up more points, but to my eyes this is mostly due to offenses finally seeing where we’re deficient and spamming plays that take advantage of that. Not some sudden collapse of the quality of our play.

I understand that we were ranked in the top 20 in the country, we were heavy favorites each of the last two weeks, and technically had a path to the College Football Playoffs, but this defense has been playing like this all year long. We haven’t gotten worse, and our defense has never been better than the MWC offenses we’ve played week to week (Utah State excepted). Some of those offenses just didn’t take advantage of it. We were never serious contenders.

I don’t get why the last two weeks seem dramatically different to people than weeks 4/5, which saw us give up 52 to San Jose and 45 to Bosie State.

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I don’t get why we’re so bad at the details.

Good defense is the cumulative effect of little things. It’s safeties taking the proper footwork to stay over the top of deep routes. It’s linebackers getting to their gap responsibility in the run game, and then ‘falling back’ to the ball carrier when the ball goes somewhere else to help make the tackle. It’s defensive ends pushing lineman backwards to make the hole smaller, even if they can’t make the tackle themselves.

Good defenses are like a boa constrictor. They wrap up every inch of an offense, and then they squeeze it until it’s still. We seem to do that second part in waves. When the secondary is squeezing the hell out of the wide receivers, the defensive line is much too lose with the quarterback. So the offense wriggles out. When the defensive line and linebackers squeeze the run game, the guy tackling the ball carrier just misses. So the offense wriggles out. Rinse and repeat. The inability to have 11 guys do their jobs at a high level simultaneously just leaves us utterly inept.

What I don’t get is why. I have some answers, the most damning of which is that too many our athletes just aren’t athletic enough. But after spending a weekend pondering, I accept this is an insufficient explanation for the severe degree of play-to-play technical failure the Cougs had on Saturday.

I don’t get why we are still unable to execute techniques these guys have been working on since the spring. Mike Leach’s offenses had their problems, but as time went on they were tighter. More disciplined. More technical. Generally more effective. The man was clearly an effective teacher, and his offenses reflected physical and mental growth over time. I don’t understand why the same doesn’t seem to be true about Dickert’s defenses.

I could make positive assumptions and argue that his scheme choices have hidden subpar athletes for most of the season, but that doesn’t explain why those athletes don’t seem to be smarter, more detailed, and better positioned as the season has progressed.

Again, why are we still unable to execute techniques they have undoubtedly been working on since spring?

I’m not saying Dickert and Schmedding are poor teachers, but I am saying that great teaching usually bears more fruit than this.

I don’t get why individual players haven’t gotten better.

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I don’t get the complaints about scheme.

If technique and athleticism is what allows defenses to squeeze offenses till they’re dead, scheme is the what allows defenses to ‘wrap up every inch of an offense’. There are lots of ways to have defensive players cover offensive players. If defenses are nets, then specific schemes are the net’s pattern. As people complained about the scheme and the defensive performance on Saturday, I was left thinking about two things in particular.

a) What does it mean for a defense to be ‘sound’.

Sound defensive schemes are ones that ensure that no matter what an offense does, there is someone on the defense responsible for stopping it. In the run game this means there is a player for every gap. In the pass game it means there is a player for every route, or for every part of the field. A ‘sound’ defensive scheme is like a net that doesn’t have any holes.

Sometimes defensive coaches use unsound schemes. I recall Mike Leach’s first DC Mike Breske being criticized for doing exactly this. It rarely works. Unsound schemes steal from Peter to pay Paul. You leave a hole in one part of your defense in order to gain a huge advantage somewhere else. If the DC is good at guessing, this can lead to huge defensive plays. It can also lead to huge offensive plays. It’s essentially gambling, and like gambling it rarely pays over the long haul.

Designing a sound defensive scheme is sorta the absolute baseline for being a defensive coordinator, and it’s one that WSU defensive coordinator Jeff Schmedding passes in my opinion. A lot of folks are upset, which is fair, but I saw a lot of people implying that the defensive scheme the last two weeks wasn’t sound.

It was. But no scheme works when you don’t tackle. No scheme works when you can’t execute technique. There are many reasons to be critical of Schmedding and Dickert’s defensive coaching, but the implication that they’re employing broken or unsound schemes just doesn’t seem right to me. We have players next to/near the offensive players just about every time. The receivers aren’t alone, they just aren’t covered. The running backs are being hit, they just aren’t being tackled.

I don’t get the complaints that our scheme is broken.

b) Scheme needs to be more than just ‘sound’. It needs to be additive.

If drawing up and teaching a sound scheme was the whole thing, a lot of people could be defensive coordinators. What great coordinators do is employee schemes that actually *add* to their player’s abilities.

To stretch the net analogy to its extreme, the key isn’t just designing a net without holes, it’s picking a pattern for the stitching that makes it as strong as possible given the materials you’re using.

If you have a safety that struggles to stay with fast receivers, you pick a scheme that allows him to…not have to do that. If you have defensive lineman that don’t have a lot of torque, you pick a scheme that allows them to move or slant so they can turn their speed into power instead. The world is full of great answers to problems, and great coordinators pick the ones that allow their players to feature their best attributes in match ups that favor them the most.

It’s hard to argue that Schmedding and Dickert have been doing that the last couple weeks, or even much this season at all. Even Dickert has acknowledged this, saying repeatedly in September that he had gotten out coached and the players had picked him up and won anyway.

I don’t get why this hasn’t seemed to get better.

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I don’t understand the choices Schmedding and Dickert are making.

Life and football are about making hard choices that have tradeoffs. While Dickert took blame for poor defensive performances in September, that is not the tone he struck after the OSU loss. Instead, he blamed ‘lack of playmaking in the core of our defense’.

I wrote last week about how Dickert seems to prefer schemes that put a lot on his inside linebackers, and so it’s hard for me to read those comments as anything other than calling those guys out*.

*Though I’d be open to expanding this to the safeties as well, who also struggled against OSU and reside in the interior of a defense.

Which brings us to the fundamental question when it comes to evaluating defensive scheme. What are the alternatives? It’s easy to sit back and say something didn’t work, but it’s harder to judge what’s right when you don’t know the next best alternative. It’s the backup quarterback fallacy. Fans always love the backup, until they see him play. Coaches see the backup play every day. That’s usually why they are playing the starter. This is especially true when the starter is terrible.

Are Schmedding and Dickert making choices that aren’t working? Without question. Are Schmedding and Dickert asking players to do things they aren’t able to do? Also without question. The trouble is that doesn’t necessarily mean they aren’t making the best choices. Sometimes a team just isn’t very good, and coaches have to ask too much of *somebody*.

They ask themselves, ‘should we be unfair to our safety, or our middle linebacker? Who is more likely to handle that well? Who do we have who can lose by just a little, rather than by a lot?’

In those moments, the question isn’t ‘how can I help this player be great’. It’s like an American election, you ask yourself ‘who can be the least worst?’

The trouble is, from the stands, we can’t see the options they didn’t pick. We don’t see them practice. We have no idea what the alternatives are, and if the coaching staff is in fact picking the least worst schemes. We can just see that whatever they’ve chosen, it’s terrible.

I don’t get why Schmedding and Dickert have landed on these choices. But they seem bad.

It will probably cost one of them their job, fairly or unfairly, but for the money that goes into all of this—that isn’t an unfair conclusion. That standard is the standard, and the Cougar defense has been below it all season.