hybrid 3-4

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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?]

I thought Air Force had a very good defense. They weren’t big or super fast, but they were smart and sound—if a defense as a whole could get a nickname I’d call them Ol’ Eleven Kovacses.

Their gameplan was also brilliant. They knew Michigan wanted to run inside the tackles, get Speight some confidence, and get athletes out to the edge, so Air Force came in with a plan to jam up running lanes and make Michigan try to guess where the big hole would be. This is AF’s look on Michigan’s first running play:

They’re in base 3-4 personnel, with both ends lined up in 5-techniques (over the tackles’ shoulders), both OLBs in 7-techniques (over the TE or hypothetical TE’s shoulders) and one safety down at linebacker depth to react to Michigan putting a lineman (Ruiz) at tight end.

Now this is not Belicheck’s mother’s 3-4. That nose tackle was 5’11/260. He certainly wasn’t going to be two-gapping. Rather out of this setup Air Force’s plan was to have the nose attack almost like Brown’s 3-3-5 linebackers, appearing in any A or B gap on any given play and making life hard on Michigan’s inexperienced interior OL to figure out what to do with him.

If that all sounds familiar, it’s because you’re old, and it is:

That’s right: that sonovabitch Calhoun walked into Michigan Stadium and tried to run Bo Schembechler’s defense on us.

[After the JUMP: The 50 slant, and picking holes in it]

He will pull off your arm and beat you to death with it and then settle down for a meal, it will be just like "Alive" down to the sexy 70's hair. Dex's latest at the WLA is pretty great all around but possibly best for highlighting this Vernon Gholston-esque gun show photo:

So that's where the rest of Tate Forcier's biceps went. (reference)

Diaries jihad! With the advent of the season I am moving things from diary to board with extreme prejudice. Consider whether your diary has the same level of value as a typical jamiemac post or this thorough research from BlueSeoul (who you may remember as Odoms hater from the season preview…

…but he's contrite):

1st Stat Category: Yards per thrown at
This stat is better than yards per catch because it includes a penalty for players who drop the ball or loaf it on a play and don't get open.  Yes they are penalized for having a bad QB but that would affect all the numbers across the board.
Hemingway  17.33
C. Brown      13
Koger           11
Savoy             5.5
Odoms           5
Grady(19)      3.5
Mathews        3.16
Stonum, Webb, Cox, Shaw, 0

I'm not so sure about including plays on which a guy is bracketed and the quarterback is just chucking the ball away in the general direction of the player, but that's an interesting metric to track throughout the season.

Back to the larger point: please read the guidelines before posting up a diary (they're right above the text entry area), and let's try to keep that area of the site extremely high-value. I'm moving anything that seems like it was dashed off in ten minutes without thought. FWIW.

Speaking of high-value diaries. Steve Sharik's got an initial defensive analysis:

Obi Ezeh made a very nice tackle on a WR screen, but he still has a ways to go.  His reaction time needs to improve.  Example, 2nd play of the game, the B gap window opens right in front of him and there is no lead blocker.  This is LB 101.  Open window = hit it.  He should have hit the RB behind the LOS for, at worst, no gain and probably a 1-yard loss.  Instead, he hit the RB at 2 yards and they ended up with a 3-yard gain.

I noticed this too and did not deploy a minus, but maybe I should go back and at least provide a –0.5. Sharik also mentions that Ezeh spent some time "catching" blockers, which is great lingo I will immediately imbibe for a frustratingly commonplace occurrence in the Life of Obi.

One quibble:

Stevie Brown is an OLB.  He is not a hybrid player.  The true hybrid player is the strong safety, Mike Williams.  Sometimes he was at the LOS (line of scrimmage), and sometimes he was a deep safety.

No, Stevie Brown hasn't been playing anything except outside linebacker in anything I've gotten to in UFR, but one of the themes of the offseason was the multifaceted use of the word "hybrid" and how confusing everything got when you were trying to deploy it yourself. Brown's a hybrid in one sense because he's a tiny OLB who can reasonably cover a slot receiver, as he did on Western's first third-down attempt in the game, not because his position is particularly innovative. Maybe we can just call him a "mammal" instead, as opposed to ponderous, hibernation-prone dinosaur Johnny Thompson. (No offense meant to Thompson; he was just born 20 years too late to be an outside linebacker.)

Mwa ha ha ha. Yes, I am a sucker for teaching your children that the guy in the other uniform is evil and should be poisoned and then putting them on the internet in a fashion that will ruin their first dates for all time. Yes, doing this will get your video on MGoBlog:

You, out there with the kid: cute violence == pub.

Refutin'. More parents chime in on The Article In Question:

"Personally, knowing Coach Rod, I don't think there's any truth to it, I don't think there's any merit in it," Michael [Shaw, father of Mike Shaw] said.

Aand Carletta Moore, mother of redshirt freshman TE Brandon, FTW:

"First of all, it's wrong, because I went straight to the source -- I went straight to Brandon -- and it's a rumor," Carletta said. "My thought on it -- the devil has a job to do, too, you know? That's just the way I see things. I don't think there's truth to that story at all. Coming from my son, there's no truth to that story."

Hey, I didn't say it.

Hockey approacheth. Tim of Yost Built is kicking off season preview-related activities with five burning questions for the season. I'd forgotten how preposterously deep Michigan is at D:

The Wolverines are carrying nine defensemen on the roster right now: Chris Summers, Steve Kampfer, Brandon Burlon, Chad Langlais, Tristin Llewellyn, Scooter Vaughan, Greg Pateryn, Lee Moffie, and Eric Elmblad. The first four are locks to be in the lineup every night, barring injury. There are fewer games to go around (at least in theory) for the third-pairing defensemen since Kampfer and Burlon are healthy after missing a combined 24 games a year ago.

Wow. Vaughn's been dogged with persistent rumors of a move to forward, but they could hypothetically redshirt Moffie if he wanted to be redshirted. (Moffie wasn't drafted by the NHL, FWIW, so he might be amenable to that in an effort to get more playing time overall.) The upshot is that Bryan Hogan is the hockey team's Brandon Graham—he cannot get injured—and that the team looks like it should own again, though hopefully with better luck in the tournament this time.

Michigan Monday is always more fun after Michigan does not soil itself:

True freshman Tate Forcier got the start at quarterback and looked…well…he looked…okay, I’ll just come out and say it, he looked really, really good. There, I said it. He finished the game 13-20 for 179 yards and three touchdowns. He also carried the ball 11 times for 37 yards. Forcier looked completely comfortable throughout the entire game. He was poised and knew where to go with the ball just about every time.

Whole thing worth a read; skepticism expressed at what happens when Michigan gets "punched in the mouth" next week, which is fine metaphorically except for the fact that Notre Dame is not really a punch-you-in-the-mouth sort of team unless we get a –then-run-away-and-hide appended to it.

Etc.: Hemingway: new #1 receiver? Wojo again.