MightAndMainWeCheer

September 18th, 2010 at 6:14 PM ^

It looks like we were having trouble holding our outside contain this game. 

-  JT Floyd should never get beat to the outside like he did against UMass's 1st touchdown.  As a CB, he is the last man on the flank.  Floyd needs to force the RB to cut inside where his help will be; when he loses contain, there is nobody there to back him up.  He needs to stay at the minimum on the outside shoulder of the RB.  This is basic high school football stuff.

-  I'm guessing this responsibility changes from play-to-play, but the DE/OLB/Spur/Bandit in charge of the D gap on the TE side or C gap on the non-TE side needs to make sure that they do not get hooked by a lineman.  Their responsibility is to force everything back to the inside.

-  Sometimes our alignments give up the edge.  There are instances where we line a DE and OLB/Spur/Bandit inside of a TE, usually on the weakside of double TE formations as we shift to the strong side.  This is a scheme issue that hopefully gets corrected.  We cannot be blindly running a 3-3-5 on every single play; different offensive formations should dictate different defensive alignments.  This isn't exactly earth-shattering news.

- I hate when a backside DE gets beat on a bootleg because they flowed too hard down the line and lost contain on the QB.  The backside DE generally never catches the RB on that stretch play and should be playing for the bootleg until he sees the QB doesn't have the ball.

We did miss a lot of tackles and we had trouble getting off blocks at times, so obviously some technique work needs to be re-emphasized at practice, but our defense's main issues appeared to be related to gap assignments and staying disciplined.  These things are correctable.

Our secondary will struggle, but I do not see any talent issues in our front 6.  Our run defense will be fine against those power running teams like Wisc/Iowa/MSU/OSU,etc. as long as we play our assignments correctly.  If we don't, we'll obviously get gashed by anybody, like what happened today.