Previously: Maryland Offense 

This is the bad stuff. Maryland's offense, as we covered, is solid. Pulled forward by a few talented players but held back by leaky pass protection and suspect coaching, capable of making brilliant plays and also getting thwacked by good teams. The defense is just the last part of that preceding sentence except with "good" deleted: "getting thwacked by teams". All the teams. Maryland is the worst P5 defense Michigan has seen this season, and by a sizable margin. They're 78th in the SP+ defensive rankings, which is worse than it seems when you remember there are only ~65 P5 teams. Maryland has allowed 17, 51, 66, 34, 35, 31, and 40 points in seven conference games this season. 

Why are the Terps so bad at defense? You've come to the right place to find out. 

 

The Film: We're riding the MSU train again because it's a decent comparable, a recent game, and I already have my fingers on the game film. Maryland surrendered 40 points to MSU, all of them being legitimate offensive points, so this was not a great effort whatsoever. Obviously Michigan State's OL is not as good as Michigan's but the similarities between the two teams are solid enough to make me tab the Spartans for this week's double dip. 

Personnel: Seth's chart. Click for big. 

We'll unpack this more in the next section, but Maryland runs some unusual formations, alternating between a 5-2-4 and a 4-2-5 look, among other personnel packages. We've chosen to display the diagram in 4-2-5 formation, but the 5-2-4 features heavily too. When they go to the five-man defensive front, they lean heavily on their defensive tackles, so there are 2.5 starters at that position. The two full starters are Ami Finau at NT and Mosiah Nasili-Kite at DT, both of whom got the ole cyan after being ejected from the East Lansing universe all day long. I actually thought the half-starter Greg Rose was the best of the three DTs and all three get a heavy workload. Darrell Jackson and Tommy Akingbesote rotate in on occasion and neither are better than the big three- which is a pretty grim statement. 

The defensive ends are a bit diversified, between the standard end and the JACK position. The standard end spot is held down by Sam Okuayinonu, who I think is the best piece on the defense. That's a pretty standard job, playing hunched over with a hand in the dirt and pass rushing or setting the edge. On the flip side, the JACK plays standing up and can drop into coverage on occasion. The starter at that position is Lawtez Rogers and most of those remaining snaps are siphoned up by Tyler Baylor. Farther down the depth chart you find talented freshman Demeioun Robinson. Maryland really misses proficient pass rusher Durrell Nchami, who was hit with the injury bug like so many Terps back in October. 

The linebacker position is rough. Though the scheme deletes one LB from the equation anyway, the two they have on the field do more than their fair share of damage. Ruben Hyppolite II and Ahmad McCullough are the "starters", but there's a significant amount of rotation at this position because they're all just a series of bandaids who repeatedly get ripped off by opposing offenses. Graeme Spraggins (great name BTW) was the third LB who played the most in the game I watched, but former walk-on Kobi Thomas has also played a good bit this season too. 

The secondary isn't nearly as abject as their front seven, but that's still not saying much. Tahreeb Still had a very up-and-down performance at corner in the game I saw, while Jakorian Bennett was second in the running for the Dangerman status in this article after doing alright against Jayden Reed. The nickel when Maryland goes to five DBs is most likely to be Lavonte Gater, but it could also be Kenny Bennett, or versatile CB/S piece Isaiah Hazel, or even Corey Cooley. The safety position is pretty locked in, with the ultra-talented but wild Nick Cross and the veteran Jordan Mosley getting the vast majority of the snaps at this position. They don't really have a big difference between deep and box safeties, with both Mosley and Cross spending time rolling down or playing deep centerfield in their Cover 1 scheme. 

[AFTER THE JUMP: Ouch]

Base set: Now we can get into the Fun With Formations section of the piece. As stated above, Maryland has two base looks, the 4-2-5 and the 5-2-4. Here's the former, which we had depicted graphically in Seth's chart: 

Here we can clearly see the defensive line distinctions that were mentioned in the "personnel" section. The defensive end has a hand in the dirt on the top of the DL, while the JACK (in this image, #4 Demeioun Robinson) is playing hunched over on two legs. There are two defensive tackles in the middle of the line and then two standard linebackers positioned at the 40-yard line. The three corners are lined up over the three MSU wide receivers. That Terp defender you see next to the slot corner slanted towards the QB at the 43-yard line is a safety! As part of Cover 1, they roll the box safety down, functioning like a LB. Meanwhile the deep safety is lined up all the way back in Grand Haven, nearly 15 yards behind the line of scrimmage, the deepest safety alignment Michigan has seen since Washington did a similar thing back in week two. 

The 5-2-4 doesn't look that different: 

All three down linemen in the middle of the line are defensive tackles, while the two ends are both JACKs! Sometimes one will be a standard DE, but the core of the 5-2-4 is putting three DTs on the field simultaneously. The LB alignment is the same, as is the safety alignment, which features the box safety lined up on the side of the field closest to the bottom of the screen, at roughly the 46-yard line, and the deep safety miles away like usual. The corners are shadowing their receivers. 

Man or zone coverage: Maryland runs a base Cover 1, which is mostly man coverage with the exception of the deep safety. Maryland ran Cover 1 on the vast majority of plays in this game, but they did feature more zone-centric looks on some occasions. Late in the first half they decided to drop into prevent defense for no apparent reason, and then every so often would flash Cover 3 (easy to disguise because the lone deep safety can still be used). But in totality, this is a man defense. 

Pressure: Maryland is a particularly blitzy team, rushing more than four guys on 57% of snaps in this game. Most of that is rushing five, which is part of their base defense given that they play with five at the line often. The most frequent "blitz" is to see Maryland send all five linemen as rushers, but sometimes you'll see the JACK drop and an LB rush. Or when it's a four-man front, you'll see the box safety rush. You might think that a team as blitzy as Maryland would be adept at generating pressure. You would be wrong, and that's one of the main flaws with the defense, which we'll get to later. 

Dangerman: When I filled out the spreadsheet for Seth to make the diagram, I designated this week's Dangerman by writing: "star", but with the quotation marks included. In other words, he's a "star" not a Star. This defense is horrendous and I was forced to pick someone (kicking and screaming), so DE Sam Okuayinonu is our Dangerman In Name Only. The 6th year DE was a JUCO product who has rounded into a respectable pass rusher that can also set the edge (on some occasions). He was the player who had the best performance in this one, and with a solid PFF grade to back it up, I rolled with Okuayinonu. 

Here was his best moment in the game: 

DE #97 to bottom of DL

Okuayinonu showed good burst off the snap, allowing him to penetrate into the backfield with some degree of regularity. However, pass rush for Maryland as a team was generally putrid, so most of my clips of him are in run defense. Here he is just one play earlier hammering the TE #11 into the backfield and forcing KWIII to bounce it outside:

DE #97 to the top of the DL 

 And here's one of him again beating the TE to penetrate into the backfield and helping out on a gang stop: 

Yeah, not exactly the flashiest highlights, but Okuayinonu is very far from an Arnold Ebiketie-level pass rushing threat when it comes to being a defensive end. Rather, he grabbed my eye by being the one guy who could get into the backfield with any degree of consistency, and one of just a few players to not be regularly paved off the field by the MSU OL. Remember, this is a grim situation! 

 

Overall 

Here's my introduction to the overview of the Maryland defense, personified by a message I sent to Seth in Slack yesterday: 

This defensive showing by Maryland was a steaming pile of garbage. They got next to no pressure on Payton Thorne, even though they routinely sent five rushers, they let MSU RBs run for 5 YPC (including 6.5 YPC for Jordon Simmons!), and let Thorne go 22/30 for 287 yards on 9.6 YPA for 4 TD and a lone INT that came on a half-ending (meaningless) Hail Mary. MSU put up 484 total yards on 7.4 yards per play, and scored 40 total points. 6 of MSU's first 10 possessions (not counting the abridged, time-constrained drive to end the first half) ended in touchdowns, and another was cut short prematurely by an MSU fumble. 

*gasps* 

THIS IS A DEFENSE THAT GAVE UP 35 POINTS AND 446 YARDS TO DONAVEN MCCULLEY-LED INDIANA 

It's a horrendous situation in College Park. 

The Terps' first flaw is that they have zero defensive tackles who can hold up against a half-decent offensive line. I cyan'd both starting DTs and I have plenty of clips to back that up. For instance: 

That's both starters, Ami Finau and Mosiah Nasili-Kite, getting shoved four yards backward to clear room for a seven yard gain. Plays like that were more plentiful than apples in an apple orchard. Here's another one: 

On that one, it's Finau getting thrown down to the ground by MSU's OL #71, although our Dangerman happens to make a pretty nice tackle to limit the damage. But whether or not the end made up for it, most plays saw the defensive tackles get ejected from the line like a DVD. And the reason I said "whether or not the end made up for it" is because the linebackers were almost never making up for it. The LBs are unquestionably the weakness of the defense because they can't do anything. They can't recognize a gap, they seek blocks rather than trying to tackle the ballcarrier, and they have only a rudimentary knowledge of how to cover a receiver. 

On this play we see many of the storylines with the defense. Okuayinonu penetrates but can't make the play, while Nasili-Kite is sealed off and then MLB Ruben Hyppolite II is totally lost and overruns the back, leading to a huge KW3 gain: 

DT #34 and MLB #11

This play highlights a frustrating tendency of the Maryland LBs to seek blocks, rather than trying to get off them or maneuver around blockers to find the guy with the ball: 

LB #19

The play is bouncing outside, yet WLB Ahmad McCullough is perfectly content to run straight into a blocker, something I saw on tape in countless plays in this game. It also doesn't help that the linebackers can't cover anyone at all, or recognize what's going on on the majority of plays. Our next clip came late in the first half when Maryland decided to drop into prevent defense, and was one of the rare times that the LBs were expected to cover a zone. They decide to drop 15 yards downfield and leave a huge swath of grass completely uncovered, and then can't recover properly to bring down KWIII: 

That play is probably the encapsulation of why Maryland doesn't run much zone. 

This one might be the most telling, because it didn't actually affect the play. After Nick Cross gets a free rush at Thorne, the MSU QB decides to check down to Simmons, which misses the screamingly wide open TE over the middle. Watch LB Graeme Spraggins (#21) on this play: 

He decides to start chasing Simmons, who is already covered (before Thorne has turned and indicated he's going that way), leaving the TE #11 with no one near him. The Terps got away with it because Thorne panicked, but it's that play that makes you realize that the linebackers have no earthly idea what they're doing on most downs. There's no real reason to point out who is better or worse among the linebackers. They are all bad, all poorly coached, and all liabilities in the run game and the passing game. There are likely going to be lots of easy yards for Erick All against the LBs if Michigan wants them. 

The secondary isn't as flamingly bad as the rest of the team, despite the fact that Maryland's pass defense numbers are a raging wild fire. I'd argue that there are two primary reasons for that: first, I'd go with that "the linebackers can't cover anybody" thing, and second, a total lack of pressure generated on the QB from the front seven. Watch this play: 

They're playing man coverage but none of their five rushers are even close to getting home, so on that play you have CB Tahreeb Still being asked to play man on Jayden Reed. Payton Thorne has enough time to knit a sweater in the pocket, and he's able to deliver a perfect ball to a receiver who only has a small step on Still. Cornerbacks have to have more help than that. Don Brown's man defenses at Michigan were predicated on having elite cover corners (which Maryland doesn't have) and also on pressuring the heck out of the opposing QB (which Maryland can't do to save their lives). That's a recipe for disaster. 

Though Still got victimized there by Reed, I didn't hate CB Jakorian Bennett's coverage, who got the Reed assignment most frequently. I liked his defense here on a crossing route vs. MSU's Keon Coleman: 

On the other hand, the nickels didn't impress me all that much. CB Lavonte Gater got burned on the flea flicker, which HOW CAN THE B1G KEEP LETTING MSU GET AWAY WITH THIS?:

The safeties play a big role in the box, but I didn't think that either Nick Cross or Jordan Mosley were particularly savvy tacklers, though they had a better understanding of what was going on in a given play than anyone in the LB room does. They feature as blitzers a decent amount, which we saw Cross do on an earlier play. Here he is blitzing again and pushing a blocker back into Thorne's lap, forcing a Thorne overthrow off his back foot, that then gets negated by a Bennett DPI call that I'm iffy on: 

It's worth noting that Cross and Mosley alternate between who is the box and who is the deep safety on a given play. The issues in the rushing game have some blame to be placed on the safeties. Mosley is too slow here to figure out what's going on when the play bounces outside (also Okuayinonu gets edged here, showing the limitations of this week's Dangerman label): 

S #18 lined up at the 7-yard line towards top of the screen

The safeties are not the defense's weakspot, but that also doesn't mean they're good. 

 

What does this mean for Michigan? 

Given how teams in Michigan's offensive sphere have fared against this Maryland defense, there should be no problem. As a general rule, we've learned that when Harbaugh & Co. don't respect an opponent, they try to just sit on them. We also know that Michigan is obsessive about getting key players to the Ohio State game healthy and not putting too much on tape for an opponent like Ohio State. Thus, I'd expect Michigan to run power over and over again and try to just pave Maryland into oblivion, mixing in play-action to Erick All over the middle. 

The Wolverines should be able to tear right through the Maryland defense with impunity and build a pretty big lead. It would not surprise me to see JJ McCarthy and Donovan Edwards play most of the second half if Michigan can go up three TDs at halftime. Whatever Michigan wants to do against the Terps on offense, they should be able to make it happen.