Previously: FFFF NIU Offense

Today we flip to the defensive side of the ball with our NIU FFFF. On Wednesday we covered the offense, which while decently mundane in content, had some notable names. This group is the reverse, high on intrigue and filled with generally ugly tape, but also few names to remember. How did this defense beat a power five team and then give up 50 to Wyoming? Let's dive in. 

The Film: Still looking at the Georgia Tech game. The Yellow Jackets were 96th in scoring offense last season at just 23.9 points per game and a moderately better 72nd ranking in yards per game. Those marks rank similarly to such teams as Minnesota and Northwestern. Which is a way of saying that this was not exactly a top tier offensive opponent that NIU was facing in this game. A second note about GT's offense: it definitely looks different than Michigan's. Though they've stopped running the triple option (a massive loss for the CFB world), Georgia Tech still runs a bona fide spread offense, with lots of QB run reads, regularly lining up with 4 to 5 WR's, and almost never playing more than six men at the line of scrimmage. So there are going to be some differences in NIU's strategy when they face Michigan's offense, compared to what you see on tape here. 

Personnel: click for big 

NIU plays a base 4-3, with two defensive tackles who play most snaps, 286 lb. James Ester (Cass Tech product) and 273 lb. Devonte O'Malley. They rotate in Demond Taylor Jr. (his grandparents forgot the "s" in his first name I guess) at that position too. On the edges they roll with Raishein Thomas and Michael Kennedy. Those two guys play pretty differently, as Thomas is a legit end who plays with a hand in the dirt on basically every snap, where as Kennedy is more of an Ojabo type in terms of playing standing up and occasionally dropping into coverage (only a few plays in this game). Measly (235 lb.) DE Ivan Davis (a Canton, MI, product) comes on as a pure rush DE in passing down situations, while Pierce Oppong gets on the field as an end too. 

The LB level sees the least rotation. Lance Deveaux Jr. is the veteran leader of the defense as a RS Sr. and he rarely comes off the field. The same can be said for sophomore LB Nick Rattin, who I think played every snap against GT, but I don't have the time to go back and count it up. NIU uses a spacebacker which they call the "Rover", Daveren Rayner. Rayner made five starts last fall as a true freshman and is back reprising his role. Since GT was a run-heavy offense, Rayner played as a LB more often than not in the game I watched, though his weight (200 lbs.) indicates he may be more DB sized. On passing downs he generally did line up as a DB, but he seldom came off the field. When Rayner comes off, Dillon Thomas comes on the backup rover. 

In the secondary the Huskies have a tandem of Jordan Gandy and Eric Rogers at CB. Gandy is the cover corner who I rarely saw do anything else than shadow his man, while Rogers gets moved around a bit. On plays where GT lined up with 3 WR's all to one side of the field, Rogers would line up on the far side basically as a LB and in fact at first I thought he was the spacebacker before checking the depth chart. As a result of that versatility, he plays more in run defense. The starting safeties were Devin Lafayette and Jordan Hansen, but Lafayette got injured during the Georgia Tech game, which means that CJ Brown is the starting safety now, and I thought he was alright in what I saw of him. CB Zhamaine March rotates into the game as well, sometimes subbing for one of the starting four and other times as the (rare) 5th true DB. 

[AFTER THE JUMP: Moar Huskies!]

Base set: Unlike last week, which was tricky with all the different looks Washington likes to throw out there, this week is remarkably easy when it comes to identifying the base set. NIU plays a very vanilla base 4-3 with the rover as one of the LB's and then uses four traditional DB's. In passing downs they line up the rover as a DB, or take the rover off in favor of a true DB and thus it looks more like 4-2-5. But those were just about the only two formations the Huskies ever went with. In just 4 of the 82 plays that I charted did NIU line up in anything other than either 4-3-4 or 4-2-5. And remember, those two alignments, if the Rover is still on the field, is the same personnel. Here's a pretty typical look at the 4-3-4 base set, which was used most often: 

I clipped this formation in particular because it shows off the common alignments that NIU was using: a base 4-3 with one edge rusher standing up, the three LB second level with one of them being the Rover (the closest to the top in this clip), and then its 4 DB's standing in the parking lot, which is something we will talk about in a moment when it comes to coverages. This is NIU's base D. 

The other variation of the base D is the 4-2-5, with the Rover lined up as a DB: 

Here you can't see the deep safety, but you can see the Rover, who I circled, lined up as a DB covering the slot receiver. The two remaining traditional LB's are in their usual spot and then Gandy (#14) is the corner down at the bottom of the screen covering the outside receiver. These are the two base sets that NIU uses. 

Man or zone coverage: In this game NIU did a bit of both. In the first screenshot above, NIU is playing man coverage with its four DB's responsible for one of GT's four wideouts. But the wrinkle is that they're running whatever the opposite of press man coverage is, giving their DB's a cushion so large that even Jabba the Hut could sit on it comfortably. The Huskies were playing the Do Not Give Up The Big Play defense to the max, which I will show you a little later, giving GT the option for the 6 yard out basically whenever the Yellow Jackets wanted it (which actually turned out to be rarely) but resolving to never get beat over the top. NIU has a lot of young players in their secondary and they know they lack the athleticism to hang with a power five school, so instead you get this outrageously soft coverage. 

They did play some zone too (mostly Cover 3) using the lone deep safety like you see in the above clip and again just trying to keep the receivers in front of them, ceding yards without giving up the big play. I would suspect we'll see more zone against Michigan because the Wolverines are a lot less likely than GT to come out with four wide on a regular basis. 

Pressure: NIU rushed an average of 4.48 players per snap, which is a bit higher than Washington, but mostly in line with the historical average for this piece. It is a four man rush on most plays, occasionally up to five or even six, but mostly four. And mostly those four are just your defensive line. They don't blitz their traditional LB's all that much as a matter of fact, and when they do it tends to be run blitzes around the edge. The corner blitz isn't nearly the concern it was last week against Washington, but you do have to watch for when Dillon Thomas comes on as backup rover, because if he's out there, more times than not it's to pass rush the QB. Overall, Georgia Tech kept their QB's well protected, though, and Northern Illinois wasn't trying too hard to change that. 

Dangerman: Unlike with the offense, this was genuinely hard to pick someone out. I thought the NIU DL got ejected from the line of scrimmage more often than not, that their traditional LB's picked the wrong gap or were fooled by play action way too often, and that it was nearly impossible to pick anyone in the secondary to be a dangerman when their scheme was making no real attempts to stop the passing attack, rather just desperately trying to limit it. Though Jordan Gandy is starred in Seth's diagram for his efforts from last season (All-MAC), I wasn't overly impressed by his play and decided to go with DT James Ester, because he was one of the players who graded out the best (even though he was still more negative than positive), having a few decent interior pass rush events. 

One of the odd developments in this game was how Georgia Tech didn't allow their QB's to see much pressure, yet when it did come, it was rarely from blitzes. Part of that was the result of blown assignments from an OL I was not impressed with, but also it sometimes was the result of really nice individual efforts from one of the linemen. Most often it was Ester, and since pass-rushing DT's are very valuable in college football, I decided to shout him out. It's also notable because NIU lost their best DT in Weston Kramer in the offseason, so Ester stepping up is a welcome sight. Here he is getting good interior rush and helping assist on a sack credited to Rayner: 

#1 second from bottom of the DL

On this next play he makes a nice swim move to get right by the center and to get into the backfield, flushing the QB out and ultimately ruining the passing play that had been called: 

#1 third from the bottom on the DL

He had a few of these kinds of play in this one, showing decent burst up the middle. That said, Ester was mostly a concern on passing downs only, as he was shoved out of the way on running downs too easily for my liking. Electing Ester as the dangerman says a lot about what I really think about NIU's defense. Spoiler alert, it ain't pretty. 

 

Overall

In our previous post we asked how in the world NIU managed to beat GT from an offensive perspective, so let's start by answering the same question from the defensive side of things. The answer turns out to be that Georgia Tech was a poorly coached team who was unable to take advantage of a very bad defense because of a few issues. Case in point, with 6:10 to go in the second quarter, Georgia Tech had averaged 6.3 yards per carry over 17 carries, yet had 0 points. And that's with NIU still playing its Charmin soft coverage against the passing game that gave GT five yard chunks through the air whenever they wanted them. Yet, despite the fact that the Jackets could pave the Huskies at will on the ground and get the six yard hitch on demand, they couldn't finish drives. 

Part of this was starting QB Jeff Sims, who couldn't hit the broad side of a barn en route to a dreadful 3/8 evening through the air: 

Despite playing soft coverage that ceded the underneath route, there were guys open down the field plenty, too, like that clip shows. Sims couldn't get it there. Here's another one on 3rd & long a little later: 

Come on, man. One more, coming on a free play where his WR had a step down the field: 

Two plays later saw Sims fumble the football and then get injured trying to recover it. He was put into a sling and then the backup (Jordan Yates) was called in, which was a blessing in disguise. Yates was not great, but he was better than the train wreck of Sims. And if they'd had Yates the whole game, they'd probably have won. 

After Yates was inserted into the game, Georgia Tech began to move the ball better, but finishing drives were still an issue. Comical inability to string plays together, turnovers (one fumble, two turnovers on downs) in addition to mismanagement by the coaching staff (burning two second-half TO's early in the third quarter), and bad kicking (0/3) summed together making this a game Georgia Tech should not have lost. I say that because they were much better than NIU, frankly speaking, in every area except coaching and fundamentals. And it's worth remembering that Georgia Tech is a bad power five team. Wyoming hung 50 on NIU the very next weekend, and Wyoming is not known to be an offensive powerhouse. The Cowboys have been in the 80-120 range in offensive metrics the last several seasons. And that team hung 50 on NIU. This is a bad defense that got let off the hook in week one. 

Part of the reason that Wyoming debacle may have happened is because Wyoming is a Manball team and even with GT playing spread offense, you could see glimmers from this one of how a Manball team would absolute hammer the Huskies. This will begin a series of clips of chunk runs that saw the NIU DL just get wiped off the field: 

Both DT's are doubled and both are shoved way back, and it isn't helped by the very poor route that the LB Rattin (#38) takes, totally missing the hole, or the blown tackle by Eric Rogers (#12). Another: 

O'Malley (#95) gets totally blown away, both LB's take terrible routes and are easily sealed off to create a gaping hole, and then you have more bad tackling when the DB's have to get involved. This kind of stuff happened frequently. And as you may have noticed here, the DT play wasn't good by any means, but it was exacerbated by the brutal LB play. Here's an instance where the DT's did okay and NIU had the play set up well, but Rattin and Deveaux biff their part and it results in a first down: 

#38 to bottom of the screen and #2 in the middle of the LB's

Brutal. Rattin shoots into the backfield out of control and all the GT blocker has to do is guide him aside, but even after that, Deveaux has the chance to make the stop and is juked out of his shoes. Eventually NIU decided to mix in run blitzes and just generally tried to send their tacklers hard around the edges because there was no way to get up the middle. GT countered it by sending their backs right up the gut and with the speed advantage firmly in the Yellow Jackets' hands, they were able to get stuff like this: 

One last area of success that GT had that I doubt Michigan will use is the read option game. Georgia Tech has this built heavily into their spread system and it worked to great success, as the edge defenders were often totally bamboozled, biting hard and allowing the Jackets to pick up more chunks on the ground: 

#5 there is the stand-up edge Michael Kennedy, who, along with the cameraman, gets totally fooled. And it happened on more than a few occasions. I would be stunned to see Harbaugh and Gattis take the reads out of the garage for a game that can be won simply by stating "we have Blake Corum", but if they wanted to practice it, they'd probably have success with it. 

Georgia Tech got 5.2 YPC for the game (sacks included) on 52 carries. Wyoming got 4.2 YPC (sacks included) on 42 carries. If Michigan's interior doubles are not blowing NIU's DT's all the way back to DeKalb, and Corum and Haskins are not abusing Rattin and Deveaux, then something very different than the tape of the first two weeks will be going on, because this is a team Michigan should be able to absolutely pave. 

And though Michigan should win this game on the ground alone, I would like to see them let Cade McNamara try to get into rhythm, because this is a good defense to do it against. That's because there will be plenty of these kinds of easy plays open underneath: 

Those kinds of passes will be additionally useful in this upcoming game, because Michigan should be able to get more yards out of them on average compared to Georgia Tech because of the better athletes Michigan has at the wideout position. String together a few of those 5 to 7 yard passes to build up Cade's confidence to get him cooking and then you can let him take shots down the field. We saw some open ones already during the Sims blooper reel, but Georgia Tech eventually hit one for a huge gain: 

Michigan should be able to do whatever they want through the air and on the ground against these guys, so long as Cade McNamara is marginally more competent than Jeff Sims. 

 

So is there no reason to worry?

No reason really. Unless Michigan turns it over five times and suffers severe injuries (and even the latter happening shouldn't be a major obstacle), this should be a comfortable victory. Yeah, NIU had a few decent defensive plays, but more times than not I found myself thinking they were related to Georgia Tech being poorly coached and making mistakes rather than anything that NIU was doing really well. That's why I picked Ester as the dangerman, because he was one of the only players who had a highlight reel that wasn't just "why didn't that GT OL pick up the untouched blitzer?". Stuff like this: 

Another instance where the run blitz got home for reasons that should be solved by the OL proficiency Michigan has shown through two weeks (this one featuring one of the only 3-3-5 snaps NIU had all game!): 

This leads me to the last observation I have from this game, which is that I'll give Thomas Hammock's coaching staff some credit. This group isn't talented, playing at a major deficiency in that regard, but they were disciplined in what they were trying to do. The LB's should be coached better, sure, but compared to Georgia Tech, which I thought was a mess, NIU did enough to hang in the game and take advantage of mistakes. They'll have a few tricks ready for Michigan, I think. It probably won't matter. 

 

What does it mean for Michigan?

Maul their defensive line to open huge holes, match Corum and Haskins up against the poor tackling LB's and DB's, sit back and cackle. Let Cade throw to wide open guys underneath and then let him off the leash a little bit once you're up a couple touchdowns. Don't turn it over and bury NIU early, then let the backups get a quarter+ of action. The end.