The defensive problems aren't the HUNH it's the CB's

Some are still worried about our pass rush. Here are a few more numbers to consider. Trickett only held the ball for more than 3 seconds from the snap the entire game. He threw 2 completions on those 6 plays and 2 were sacks. Other two were incomplete passes.

Most plays the ball was gone in less than 2.5 seconds. Thats very quick and extremely hard to get sacks when a QB is doing that.

Skeeterpop said:

Some are still worried about our pass rush. Here are a few more numbers to consider. Trickett only held the ball for more than 3 seconds from the snap the entire game. He threw 2 completions on those 6 plays and 2 were sacks. Other two were incomplete passes.

Most plays the ball was gone in less than 2.5 seconds. Thats very quick and extremely hard to get sacks when a QB is doing that.

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We need to play more press coverage to keep teams from doing that.

I thought our D looked as good as any D could slowing down WV's high octane offense, did we shut it down, no we didn't, but, our Boys limited WV offense down way below the yards & points they're used to putting up..I don't think these offenses will be shut down, all you can do is slow them down, and put up more yards & points than they do..And that's exactly what we did to WV..There were a couple of busted coverage's..That's to be expected in the 1st game against one of the better HUNH offenses & one of the best offensive minded HC's in the game..I was proud of our D & they will only get better..This game will go a longggg ways in given our Boys the confidence in playing these HUNH offenses..

During this run that the program has experienced since 2008, the identity and championship aspirations have been based on the defense, or at least how great the defense could be. CNS and his coaches have turned out some of the most dominant defenses of this era of college football, but moving forward, I'm not sure if that will continue to be how we should judge the team. I say this because of the rule changes and the widespread adoption of HUNH offenses that Bama will have to face moving forward. I believe that no longer will Bama be able to show up against the talented offenses being run by talented coaches and expect that the defense will just shut that offense down. At least not week to week. Sure, the caliber and type of defensive player that is recruited by the coaches can help, but I think that Bama, and the rest of college football, will start to look a lot like NFL defenses in that defensive success will be measured by how the defense performs situationally. How good is the defense in the redzone? How good is the defense in a quick turnaround after a turnover? These are the ways that I believe we need to measure defenses these days.

In that respect, the defense had a positive game Saturday night. They have a long way to go, but they'll get there.

It appears Eddie has taken Syvle's spot opposite Cyrus Jones for 1st team reps in practice. Jackson had issues with where to be last year, but his ball skills were fantastic. Sylve was in postion many times, but had a hard time finding the ball.

CoachJeff said:

Sylve was in postion many times, but had a hard time finding the ball.

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I hate to be critical of a particular player, but that was my take as well. He was in position most of the time, and that's what you want, but he just couldn't make any plays on the ball, and that's also what you want...

crimsonaudio said:

Those guys would just about die on the field against the HUNH.

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Yea. I was wondering why we were recruiting Matt Elam at all. There really isn't a place for a 350 pound defensive tackle against the HUNH or spread. They are just liabilities against speed teams..

CrimsonForce said:

Yea. I was wondering why we were recruiting Matt Elam at all. There really isn't a place for a 350 pound defensive tackle against the HUNH or spread. They are just liabilities against speed teams..

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Situational player. He would play in obvious running situations and against teams that had a big physical running attack. Actually if you think about it if had completely eliminated the possibility that AU could have run up the middle then that would have automatically eliminated a good portion of their offense.

imauafan said:

Situational player. He would play in obvious running situations and against teams that had a big physical running attack. Actually if you think about it if had completely eliminated the possibility that AU could have run up the middle then that would have automatically eliminated a good portion of their offense.

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I don't think a guy like Elam would be much help against AU, or any HUNH. I think he would be to tired to be effective. The problem with being a situational player would be getting him subbed out of the game against the HUNH after a few plays..

CrimsonForce said:

I don't think a guy like Elam would be much help against AU, or any HUNH. I think he would be to tired to be effective. The problem with being a situational player would be getting him subbed out of the game against the HUNH after a few plays..

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You have to rotate your DL to keep them fresh. However the rotation should happen every series or every other series perhaps unless there is a timeout or some other stoppage of play. Keep in mind that not every team on our schedule is HUNH (e.g. Arkansas, LSU) so we still have to have the widebodies to plug up the middle. Even though AU is HUNH they are still predominately a power running team so you still have to have someone that can plug the middle of the D against them.

And a guy that big requires a double team which is going to leave someone else free to work the edge.

Tidefan1 said:

We need to play more press coverage to keep teams from doing that.

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Again, you can't play press coverage with cornerbacks averaging 5'10 and 185 pounds, they just don't have the physical skill set to do it. It's no different than trying to throw a jump ball to a guy like Marquis Maze. Not knocking the strategy in general, but you must have the right personnel to execute it, and we simply didn't have that on the field Saturday to do that. Had we tried, I don't think there's any real doubt that it would have been a failure.

We will play a lot more physical at the line of scrimmage when Brown and Humphrey come along, but that's just not going to happen as long as we have Cyrus and Sylve lined up out wide.

I think that, in a way, we are victims of our own success when it comes to the rising popularity of hunh O's. Think about it--along with LSU to some extent, we've dominated college football for 6-7 years with great D and pretty vanilla O and so OC's and HC's had to devise something to neutralize our size advantage and extensive usage of substitutions and other defensive schemes. Presto--you have the teams going onto the field with scripted and multiple plays mainly using speed and misdirection, otherwise known as hunh, and to a great extent it has been a huge equalizer.

fundytide said:

And a guy that big requires a double team which is going to leave someone else free to work the edge.

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Eh, not really. Sure that's true with a quality nose guard against an pro-style / interior run team, but spread teams and misdirection-based run spreads -- which includes Auburn, by the way -- will gladly block someone like that with only one offensive lineman. Guys like that are useless against bubble screens, jet sweeps, mobile QBs, and the like, all of which are staples of those offenses, and obviously their value only goes further down against HUNH teams once they get going because stamina becomes an issue.

Brandon Ivory is a pretty decent case study in this respect. Even though he has dropped probably 25 pounds and is a relatively small nose guard at this point -- he looks to be around 310 to me -- his size still rendered him a relative non-factor. WVU ran 79 offensive plays this past Saturday, and Ivory perhaps played on 25 of them (and I think that is actually being generous). Again, it's 2nd and 7 and WVU comes out with four WRs and runs a bubble screen. What good does a nose guard like Ivory, or any nose guard for that matter, do you in that situation? He's a liability at worst and a wasted spot at best because he can't really feasibly do anything to give you value.

Not saying guys like that don't still have some value in some contexts -- definitely want them around for Arkansas, LSU, Georgia, and on goal line defense -- but the evolution of offenses in the SEC has really turned them into situational players. The people who think that getting a stud NG is the solution to our problems defending the spread/HUNH are akin to those who thought the answer to the internal combustion engine was to raise faster horses.

deliveryman35 said:

I think that, in a way, we are victims of our own success when it comes to the rising popularity of hunh O's. Think about it--along with LSU, we've dominated college football for 6 years with great D and pretty vanilla O and so OC's and HC's had to devise something to neutralize our size advantage and extensive usage of substitutions and other defensive schemes. Presto--you have the teams going onto the field with scripted and multiple plays mainly using speed and misdirection, otherwise known as hunh.

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What you described is not know as "HUNH." You described an offensive scheme, which isn't a result of Alabama and LSU's dominance. This has been making its way through college football since the 1990's. It has been very popular in high school for years, too.

RTR91 said:

What you described is not know as "HUNH." You described an offensive scheme, which isn't a result of Alabama and LSU's dominance. This has been making its way through college football since the 1990's. It has been very popular in high school for years, too.

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Yeah, many much larger trends are in play here that have gotten us to where we presently are, and those trends go well beyond the recent scope of the dominance of Alabama and (to a much lesser extent) LSU.

The real underlying driving factors here are changes in rules/rule enforcement that heavily favor offenses, increased willingness by coaches to put their best players on offense, increased desire of players to play on the offensive side of the ball, widespread implementation of the spread/HUNH at the lower levels of football (high school and below), increased emphasis by athletic directors and school administrators on using highly prolific offenses as a tool to generate fan excitement and boost revenue, and in general coaches becoming less risk averse. All of those factors point the game in a direction firmly moving away from the way the game has traditionally been played in the post-war era.

It's an interesting debate:

1. Gary Danielson says the teams that can still play power football are going to be hard to stop.

2. However, the trend is to try to outscore everybody with superior offense and just have an average defense to slow the other teams down. When we face this philosophy, they are betting that their fast paced offense can score more than our slow paced offense. It's kinda like the law of averages, the more plays you run the higher percentage you'll score more points.

The debate will eventually be had a Bama at some point in the future, probably post CNS.

Simple fact is a guy like Coach Stallings would be toast in this era of football. I think it is definitely challenging CNS as well. Imo, if you ever see the NFL go all-in with these type offenses and devalue the QB position much the same way they have with the RB position because of the higher risk of injury but also being able to effectively utilize a player at the position who has a lower passing skill, then we will absolutely have to change our philosophy. In my mind if that comes to fruition, I think the playing field will be as level as it has ever been because realistically at that point a kid will have a shot at playing in the NFL from any program in the country especially if they are a skill player or defensive back.

I dont know what to really make of this change. If I am CNS, I am inclined to become even more embolden on my philosophy of having a dominating running game because you will find few teams tooled defensively to stop it. However, this interim phase is pretty difficult to manage because we face as many spread offensive teams as we the traditional power pro-style attacks. But in reality defensively you almost have to have 2 different defensive platoons for either offensive approach.

As BET mentioned, alot of they guys who naturally would be top-flight DBs are now coming up through the ranks as WRs and as a result you are seeing passing efficiency at the collegiate level at a level that I have never seen it before. I am telling you the offensive synchronization that I say from A&M the other night was very impressive. Same goes for Auburn as well but with a different approach. We are trying to dismiss are losses based on facing a hot QB - but I dont agree with that premise at all. I think we are beginning to see the QB position played at a level that you can necessarily count defensive schemes that are designed to affect the QB without sacking him as a sound strategy anymore. There a lot of really good basketball players who work tirelessly to make shots with a hand in their face or while being hand-checked. I think we are seeing QB play throughout the country being developed along the same lines. If you are not touching the QB you are more than likely going to get torched nowadays. And offensive formations and hurry up schemes have made it virtually impossible to touch the QB with any regularity.