Previously: Offense

Resources: My charting, Alabama game notes (Michigan's still not available—I bet not doing your homework is why you had to go to an SEC school, you amateur SID), Alabama roster, CFBstats

The film: Still Iron Bowl.

Personnel: My diagram:

PDF Version, full-size version (or click on the image)

So you guys I figured out where all the defensive tackles and cornerback-ish safeties have gone to. Every damn one of them is on the lying depth chart for Alabama:

DJ Dale hasn't played much since suffering a leg injury two months ago, and not at all in the last two games. They're lately starting superstar DE/DT Raekwan Davis (+13/-2) next to unexciting NG/DE Phidarian Mathis (+4/-4), and rotating in RS freshman NG Christian Barmore (+13/-8) liberally. As the scores suggest Barmore is a young Willie Henry: ludicrously strong and disruptive—especially as a pass rusher—but once he gets there it's 60/20 if he'll run past the play or fall on his face. True freshman SDEs Byron Young (+1/-3) and Justin Eboigbe (+3/-0) split the scant snaps available to them, but Bama played half their snaps with just two down linemen, and a handful of the three-down snaps with the group from the paragraph above. Young's –3 was all from one very freshman play when he chased after a zone-read running back like it's 1999.

The OLBs are quasi-defensive ends. They call the weakside one the JACK, where Anfernee Jennings (+12/-2) is closer to a traditional DE, but an extremely strong and athletic one who's expected to be drafted the first day this spring. More of an edge setter than edge rusher, Jennings is murder on any zone read run to his side. Normal SAM Terrell Lewis (+11/-2.5) has chosen to sit out the Citrus Bowl, and while that's totally understandable given his injury history, losing his 16 QB hurries is a big blow; nobody else on the team has more than half of that, and his backup, SAM Chris Allen, has barely played, though he generated some unwarranted practice buzz two springs ago.

The inside linebacker spots were already hit hard in preseason, forcing Bama to play with a pair of freshman in place of likely All-American MLB Dylan Moses and longtime backup WLB Josh McMillon. Instead they get two big true freshmen. MLB Shane Lee (+2/-4.5, +2/-3 in coverage), who played for Biff Poggi (and came up for the BBQ) last year, is the one with his head above water; WLB Christian Harris (+3/-6.5, +0/-4 coverage), a supposedly athletically gifted player who's not quite ready to be on the field, finally forced me to cyan him before going out with an injury in the 4th quarter. He was also caught jogging more than once when a sprint was necessary; I wonder if the later injury wasn't so later. Replacement WLB Ale Kaho (+2/-0, no coverage events) is a true sophomore and a good 30 pounds lighter. Everybody's swimming.

[After THE JUMP: Defensive backs Don Brown wanted]

Names from Michigan recruitments past dot the secondary. Not that Michigan ever had a shot at All-American FS Xavier McKinney (+6.5/-3, +3/-0 coverage), who's playing in this game despite already doing everything he can to be the first safety taken in April. That's him, one number-change ago, in the lead photo. Dude can do it all: body TEs, stay with slot bugs, glide over the top, and scream down like a missile on plays he's not supposed to be anywhere close to:

why even bother with anti-paterrn-matching plays?

Basically he's what Dax Hill will be in a few years when he's about to go pro. I guess that won't comfort you much.

Starting SS Jared Mayden (+3.5/-0.5, no cover grades) was an Oregon commit when Michigan was trying to flip him—you can see the Viper Michigan wanted in his acceleration—but you can also see the versatility and graceful athleticism Saban covets. For a hybrid they use another safety; HSP Shyheim Carter (+4/-0, +2/-2 cov) was another Michigan 2016 viper prospect, albeit always a longshot as a kid from SEC country. He's more of a playmaker than Mayden, whom Carter will occasionally replace in pure 3-4 sets. When they go dime the extra safety du jour is freshman Jordan Battle (+0/-2, +0/-1 cov), who will set up deep with Mayden while McKinney and Carter bracket the slot receivers from linebacker depth. He's still pretty raw.

Last year's #6 overall prospect in the 24/7 composite, right CB Patrick Surtain II (+3/-2, +2/-3 cov) right now is last-year Jeff Okudah—99 speed, 99 agility, 99 bigosity, not quite 100% awareness. He'll have no trouble staying with Collins & DPJ, but he still might do something silly once the ball arrives, and I hear outside of the Big Ten they actually flag this sort of thing. He's also got a problem with the gypsy:

The left side had the current superstar but draft-bound Trevon Diggs (you don't want to know) is sitting out—also due to a history of injuries. He played every snap of the Iron Bowl so I didn't get to see CB/S tweener Josh Jobe, but you'll recall the name from late in the 2017 cycle when he was a Brown-coveted Miami (YTM) decommit who had to play at Brad Hawkins's prep school because he aged out of his home league. When he/that went South, Michigan offered Vincent Gray. Jobe apparently still plays corner like a safety; I remember watching him shut down Cornelius Johnson a couple of years ago. Brandon Watson But Fast would be accurate.

----------------------------------

What Shall We Call the Hybrid Today? There are are few. The "Star" is a nickel safety (the guy also plays some regular strong safety) who comes in for the "Sam" linebacker, who's your standard 3-4 OLB. The other OLB is called the "Jack"—it's an OLB with some extra DE flavor, but the Jack and Sam are interchangeable enough to share a depth chart.

The Star isn't the only position where Saban likes to use his surfeit of top-50 safety recruits. The "Money" is a safety, usually McKinney, playing a quasi-middle linebacker role on passing downs while an extra safety is on the field for an inside linebacker (Don Brown calls this the Pup).

The defensive ends are hybrid DTs—again, Saban can load up every offseason on all the 6'5/293 DT recruits they're hoarding from the rest of a nation in dire need of them, and he finds snaps for all of them by rotating a lot at the 3-4's tackle-ish end positions.

Base Set: Saban has always preferred a 3-4 system, though the nomenclature has morphed over the years as he lets various defensive assistants import their terminology. The OLBs in the past were drifting to the safety spectrum, but these days Saban's base 3-4 is just as 3-4 as Wisconsin's.

You'll note the nose guard isn't over the center. That's life in the spread era. Alabama has tried to keep more of the 3-4's two-gapping flavor during the shift. You know how we count "techs" for defensive linemen by counting shoulder: 1-tech is the center's shoulder, 2-tech the guard's inside shoulder, 3-tech his outside shoulder, 4-tech the tackle's inside shoulder, 5-tech his outside shoulder, etc.? Bama's base DL are like a 2.4-tech and a 4.6-tech. Their first goal is to dominate the lineman across from them, then get into a gap (or two). The Patriots play like this too. It asks a lot of your defensive linemen.

They have two ways of going nickel from this. The first is to swap the strongside OLB (Sam) for a nickel safety (Star) to get a 3-3-5 that aligns like a 4-2-5.

The other way is the Wisconsin style, where the two OLBs stay on the field and a DE comes out for the Star, creating a 2-4-5 version of the same:

On passing sets they move out the WLB for a fourth safety. This is the 2-3-6 or "Money" set:

From the above the defense looks varied but other than switching haphazardly between Terrell Lewis (the SAM) and the freshman SDEs in nickel sets this was all largely predictable. On passing downs they were often content to bracket both slots and call it a day; on all other downs the two-high was just there to cover up whether their base pattern match was a "Rip" or "Liz" call.

Man or zone coverage: Pattern-Matching, the Cover 1/Cover 3 hybrid Saban and Belichick prefer, and nobody else has both the patience and talent to pull off. This coverage was the topic of one of my earliest Neck Sharpies:

Shown here is the left side of the "Liz" variant:

------------------------

So all of this is kind of like Quarters: you're numbering receivers, and watching if they go vertical. But you're reading the receiver in front of you (in Quarters they both read the #2) and matching your coverage to what he does (hence the name). Simplified: if your guy goes vertical or angled in, you play Cover 1, if he goes hard inside or outside you play Cover 3, passing off and catching whoever enters your zone.

The thing it's most like is basketball zones, where you stay with your man until he crosses another defender, and you pass him off to that guy.

"Rip" and "Liz" are right/left distinctions. Rip means the right-side safety comes down to a curl/flat zone on the right, with the left safety becoming the umbrella. Liz is vice-versa. I don't expect you to be able to run it after reading that.

Pressure: GERG or DR BLITZ: They don't need a lot of it:

Not because they're Ohio State and can generate pressure all the time, but because their coverage is usually so good that no quarterback is going to stick around to find out just how long his buddies can hold off the Tide. The standard down rush rate is only half blitzing; the rest is the natural thing 3-4 defenses do when there are five guys on the line of scrimmage. When they do blitz it's seldom the ILBs, or if they do it's a zone blitz with one OLB looping into a weird gap and another dropping back in coverage.

If you want Alabama to blitz, go to a bunched front. They figure, in this spread day and age, you aren't looking for a safety or cornerback to come off the edge, so will use the opportunity afforded by their proximity to test that theory. Auburn had this scouted too, and used it to win some Rock-Paper-Scissors rolls with screens. Unfortunately Bama has an answer for that too...

Dangerman: Watch 99:

I hope I covered the other other guys enough in the personnel section that we can marinate on DE/DT Raekwon Davis, who isn't the Raequan Williams from Michigan State I was obsessed with, but they're similar players. Both Raykwonis have a prototypical offensive tackle's length and great feet they use to never lose balance when riding a zone. So long as nobody can get near their chests they can be on whichever bloody side of a block they want to be at any given moment.

Davis has more pure power. I take it you've seen enough Counter Trey/Pin & Pull/Down G plays by now that you're familiar with the physics of a pulling guard kicking out a defender on the edge. Now witness the physics of Raekwon Davis (DE at the bottom):

Davis Physics go doink.

Davis is a throwback to the heyday of giant two-gapping 3-4 defensive ends (or 5-2 tackles). These days with everybody spread out you don't want to trust one dude to threaten one gap and then hurl his defender to the other side to stopper the other one. Davis can get away with it:

OVERVIEW:

It's not a vintage Alabama defense. The question they're asking in Tuscaloosa is why, and the answers are all too simple: kids in a complicated system.

I really love their run fits, because they don't have to involve the safety but can if they need to. One of the best examples of the nature of Saban's defense today is when it broke down in this game. You might need the slow-mo button a few times here:

We've got Saban's good ol' base 3-4, and they're in their good ol' odd setup, with the nose guard head-up on the center and his DE buddies covering the outside shoulders of the strongside T and backside G. The right-side safety puts his hand up to signify they're in a "Rip" call and comes down to cover the curl/flat zone to that side while the other safety shuffles over to the overhang position. The linebackers are watching their DTs to make them right. Then uh oh:

That's the Nose Guard, Phidarian Mathis, I've circled. He's getting bent back, allowing Auburn's guard, #64, to get down to the LB and create a seal. Meanwhile you can see the long arms of Raekwon Davis on the outside shoulderpad of his offensive tackle. If we're all just taking a gap and attacking it, this lane is open. Or so the back thinks…

Until Davis suddenly flips to the OT's other side. This is two-gapping. It wins back the gap Auburn tried so hard to pry open. It's also dangerous, because if he can't get to the other side, who's going to be there? And if he gets over too quickly and the back sees it, who's got his gap?

Well the way this defense works is once there's a hole, they activate the overhang safety. They trust Jones isn't going to give up his original lane, so McKinney can attack and clog up the one that looked so clean a moment ago. Meanwhile the NG is fighting back there as well. Typically by that point Davis will have his hands free in the lane and get them on the ballcarrier, but this was the odd instance when the guy blocking him got those hands under control somehow. Davis goes down.

Still: it's all a trap: that lane was bait to bring you into the maws of Jones and Phidarian.* Even if one fails, the other is squeezing the gap back shut, and there shouldn't be anywhere else to go because while this was going on nobody was blocking the WLB who snuck into the backfield to prevent a backside cut.

Except uh oh: WLB #8, Christian Harris (circled) got way upfield for no reason. And with the defense now fighting to close the gap they left open before, there's nobody to make Harris right. Not even an overhang safety.

* (good band name.)

That, in a nutshell, is what's been happening to the vaunted Bama defense despite their riches in the spots everybody would die for. Freshmen are all over the place, and when one of them makes a mistake, the system is already stressed by asking their stars to do very hard things.

This has also been true of the passing game. Below they're going to show a Doubles bracket that converts to their single-high pattern-match. The corners have the outside receivers, the four safeties are bracketing the slots with help at 10 yards on anything breaking in, and the MIKE linebacker, as always, has the running back if he comes out that way.

But our MIKE is a true freshman, and in this set he lines up as a pass rusher, and is empowered to make that into a pass rush so long as the back is staying in to block. The back is not staying in to block:

And he's not the only inside guy open. True freshman Jordan Battle, the safety way off in the distance, is not in any position to help on an in-breaking route by the slot receiver. He's staying high two beats too long. Two beats in football world is an age, just like two years in Saban's system is the trick to accessing the power of his system.

So, unsurprisingly, no this isn't a game Michigan can win by just running headlong into the line. If there's a way to beat Alabama, other than getting crazy lucky like Auburn did, it's to play games with those freshmen and see if they'll crack. Some of the tricks from The Game in 2017, when Harbaugh used some badly coached OSU LBs' momentum against them, might come in handy here. So will some of the nonsense Notre Dame's kids fell for this year. This is going to sound like an SEC knock but it's a compliment: they don't run very complicated offensive ideas down there. Even Auburn, with the motivation of a rivalry nearly on par with Michigan-Ohio State (don't @ me) behind them, weren't doing more than basic blocks and simple reads. Granted the way Bama can win back a high safety for every play makes them immune to most brain games, but with two more of their precious, well-heeled upperclassmen out for this one, a little brain work from the bookworms could pay dividends.

Just whatever you do, don't run headlong into the Maws of Jones and Phidarian.