3-4 defense

Previously in 2021: The Story. Podcast 13.0A. Podcast 13.0B. Podcast 13.0C. 5Q5A Offense: 2021. Last year: 5Q5A Defense: 2020. Defensive End. Defensive Tackle. Linebacker. Cornerback. Safety. Special Teams.

As with the offense, we are going from saddest question towards hope.

1. Do they give up 100 to Ohio State?

Not a great matchup [Bryan Fuller]

The standard has been set: If Ryan Day’s offense can’t score 100 on Michigan’s defense this year with the kind of talent they’ve acquired, he is a failure and Ohio State must jettison all of their coaches and start over. Can the Wolverines do anything to make sure that happens?

We had an entire article in HTTV about the ways Ohio State, Alabama, and Clemson have broken the game. I could show you all the data to demonstrate that those schools’ advantages are well beyond anything even in the top-heavy history of college football. It’s certainly not fun. And the people in charge aren’t even smart enough to understand it’s a problem. Michigan could “sell its soul” to be like Ohio State and it wouldn’t change the math. Kirby Smart’s Georgia is in the running for the scuzziest program in the history of the game, recruits like bonkers in the best place to do it, and even they haven’t broken through.

But we don’t really need to overcome the systemic rot of a thoroughly broken institution. We need to win a college football game. Which is way, way more doable. Last year’s Buckeyes beat IU by a touchdown, and they were in a dogfight with Northwestern until turnover luck turned both games. Penn State played them close in 2019. The year before that Ohio State got boat-raced by Purdue, barely beat Penn State and Nebraska, and needed a guy named Piggy to miss an open receiver in the endzone to not surrender the Big Ten East title to Michigan a week before The Game. The last time they visited Ann Arbor, Michigan had the ball down 2 scores with 12 minutes to go and the blocking to make it 1 score. Also JK Dobbins dribbled the ball. College football games are dumb, and Ohio State has been riding a wave of good fortune as effectual as the bad luck that’s plagued Harbaugh. We reject this because human brains would rather shape information into nonsense than accept the existence of no sense. But luck is just luck.

And here comes my one crazy statement: I think Mike Macdonald probably gives Michigan a better chance of winning a dumb football game against Ohio State than Don Brown, or at least Macdonald’s philosophy does, because it ratchets up the degree to which the result is determined by luck. I don’t believe Michigan upgraded DCs—Brown deserved his fate but he’s still a coaching legend while Macdonald is a first-time coordinator. Don Brown’s system made the ultimate sense: I dare you to beat my players at something hard. Most college teams didn’t have the talent to do that to Michigan’s talent and that led to elite performances. But even at BC, when the talent ledger angled enough the other way, Brown’s defenses got rolled.

Offenses are at such an advantage these days (for regulatory as well as schematic reasons) that anybody’s defense can get shredded no matter the talent. The smart coaches long ago learned to shift their understanding of the game from a military perspective of winning field position to the basketball paradigm of winning possessions.

Macdonald’s philosophy—or at least the Grantham/Ravens ideas he comes from—is more of a gamble. I dare you to find where I left the weak spot…NOPE NOT THERE!

Ohio State with Justin Fields could break those traps on the regular, but Ohio State with CJ Stroud? It could work. A lot of young NFL quarterbacks threw mistakes into the amorphous fronts that the Ravens showed. And this has nothing to do with the front; the way they play zone is to risk having guys out of position by having fast defensive backs get to places they weren’t supposed to threaten by alignment.

They can probably get away with that with Dax Hill.

Chris Olave and Garrett Wilson and the other mercenaries who can’t name a non-athlete graduate of the university they’re loosely affiliated with will get theirs. They're extremely talented, well-coached, hyper-football-focused players who are better than our players. In 2019 Ohio State scored a TD on 8/11 non-garbage drives against Michigan. If you can get that down to 5/11 by putting more of the game the outcome of dice rolls, do you care that those five came on coverage busts instead of a dusted cornerback? This is how Indiana approached it as well, and with even luck they win a title. If you want a nonsensical result, ratchet up the nonsense. The worst that can happen is you still lose 98-39, which isn’t going to cut it for Ryan Day.

That’s all I’ve got.

[After THE JUMP: More dumb football.]

This article has a sponsor: Neck Sharpies is sponsored by HomeSure Lending, and when I say sponsored I mean I get texts from the guy saying “You need to write a Neck Sharpies.” The guy is Matt Demorest, who's been busy lately because like passing down defensive fronts these days if your rate still has a "4" or a "3" at the start of it you're doing it wrong. It usually takes Matt and his people about 5 minutes to know if a refi makes sense, and if it doesn't they'll tell you. You know the guy, and you know from a bunch of other readers that he does a better job and charges way less than the mills.

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Happy Signing Day. Michigan today received three new letters of intent for three guys on the defensive tackle spectrum. This comes two weeks after naming Baltimore Ravens assistant Mike Macdonald one of their co-defensive coordinators, presumably the one who’ll get to shape the next iteration of Michigan’s defense.

George Rooks (currently 6-4/260), Ike Iwunnah (6-4/300) and Rayshaun Benny (6-5/275) join a class that already signed a projected SDE/DT type in Dominick Giudice (6-4/250), and three guys on SDE->3-4OLB spectrum in TJ Guy (6-4/240), Keshawn Bennett (6-4/220), and Tyler McLaurin (6-2/210). Is there a defense that can use all of these guys? Well yeah, but only one team I know runs it at the highest levels of football: the Baltimore Ravens.

The Amoeba Defense

The NFL and Michigan have the same problem: how do you stop modern NFL quarterbacks and NFL receivers who can beat anybody one-on-one. There are lot of ideas out there. Ohio State does whatever it takes to get the kinds of athletes who can beat anybody one on one. Iowa State turned their middle linebacker into a hybrid safety who starts at the safety level. Indiana has gone zone blitz crazy. Army and some SEC schools use a front that takes away B gaps and options the option to slow everything down. Iowa and Northwestern and Wisconsin are committed to Cover 2 systems that require years of tutelage. Everybody’s experimented with changing personnel, turning their 4-3s and 3-4s into 4-2-5s, 2-4-5s and 3-3-5s, and turning those into 3-2-6s, 4-1-6s, and whatnot.

The Ravens will tell you they’re a 3-4 defense, or a 3-3-5 nickel. But where other modern 3-4s (eg Alabama) have bowed to modernity by converting OLBs into hybrid safeties, the Ravens have been doubling down on the defensive line-iness of their front five while turning their linebackers into quasi or total DBs.

The approach is working. Despite cutting the one superstar they built the thing around in 2019, Baltimore was first in the league last year in old fashioned passing defense, and ninth in Football Outsiders’ fancystat DVOA (10th versus the pass). With that guy they were fifth (fourth vs the pass) in 2019. More interestingly, they have been doing it without hanging their hat on run defense—they were 12th this year, and 29th in the NFL in 2019.

That is by design. Counter to how everyone in football was taught, the Ravens built their defense starting with stopping the pass, and then figured out how to fit versus the run. They do it by blitzing more than anybody in the league, and blitzing a wider variety of players than anybody in the league. They call it the Amoeba defense, because it can shift into any look. It’s complicated, sure, but it’s also hell on quarterbacks, who are regularly unsure of their reads or throw to the wrong ones.

Macdonald was the linebackers coach, not the mastermind, of those defenses. That would be the previous linebackers coach, Don “Wink” Martindale, who was promoted in 2018. But Coach Mac was there as the concepts were implemented, and it’s a good enough bet that Jim Harbaugh chose Macdonald because he’s been Wink’s guy.

[After THE JUMP: Does Michigan’s roster have what this takes?]

Previously: Offense (image via Huskers.com)

The film: Last year Nebraska's defense was kind of a mess. S&P+ had them ranked 110th (out of 130 teams), 116th in rushing, 102nd in passing. Some of that was a rejection of Bob Diaco's switch to a 3-4. Most of it was a rejection of Diaco himself.

A thing about college football however is it's not that hard, with an injection of competence, to get a group of 4- and 3-stars from the 100s to the 50s. You all remember Hoke and Mattison doing that with Michigan's defense in 2011. You see what skills you have on hand, choose a system you know how to teach that uses those skills, and make this an identity. Voila: something approximating competence.

Through two games it appears Frost's fellow UCF import Erik Chinander has built just this sort of jalopy. They're not a GREAT defense, but they might be good? Two games against questionable competition (Colorado might be bad, Troy is a good Sun Belt team) and high-tempo throw off the counting stats but they're giving up 4.2 YPC rushing, and 4.9 YPA passing (counting sacks with the latter).

Their strength is at safety, where some experienced starters returned from injury and are joined by a former UCF star, and a seven-man deep defensive line. Whether both units are a B+ or A+ is hard to tell—they do have three guys starting over the one bona fide GOOD player they had last year, and given his job was taken by last year's late breakout player that might not even be a Godin/Give-the-2nd-Unit-a-Hurst kind of way. Colorado made this doubly difficult on me by not blocking the guys I was trying to assess:

You may note all of those links show the same two offensive players. One of those guys is a grayshirt redshirt freshman, but the other is a third-year starter and former freshman All-American. Are Colorado's center and left guard two of the worst collegiate players I've ever watched on film, or was Nebraska's line so dominant they just made it look that way?

Personnel: Official depth chart. My diagram (PDF, click image for larger):

Nebraska's defense so we are using black shirts instead of stars. Like Michigan's opponent last week Nebraska's defense was still in find-out-who-can-play mode and was thus rotating a lot of players, especially up front. Also note the "Key Player" from my HTTV preview is now on the bench. My entire section on the front seven needs to be rewritten.

Base Set: 3-4, and considering they mostly kept the same personnel on the field against a modern spread offense all day that's unlikely to change now.

[Hit THE JUMP for the rest of the breakdown]