Previously: Northwestern Offense 

Given that Northwestern's offense has always been a weak spot under Pat Fitzgerald, it's the typically stingy defenses that have transported the Wildcats to being respectable. Last season was no different, as Northwestern posted a defense that ranked 3rd in SP+ and allowed just 15.9 points per game, helping to get the Wildcats to their second B1G championship game in three seasons. The offseason saw heavy turnover on that side of the ball, not the least of which came at the top, where the brain behind the great Fitzgerald defenses, Mike Hankwitz, called it quits and retired at the age of 73. The transition to a new DC has been bumpy, and the losses of top tacklers Blake Gallagher and Paddy Fisher, in addition to first round draft pick corner Greg Newsome II, have taken their toll. The result is a defense that has struggled mightily against higher-end competition, giving up 38 to Michigan State and 56 to Nebraska. So, today's FFFF will be looking at where the (many) weak points are, and how Josh Gattis should draw up a game plan to rip open the purple and black and coast to an easy victory tomorrow. 

The Film: For this one, we're using the Michigan State game. As noted in our last piece, NU has really only played two good(ish) teams, Nebraska and MSU. Of those two teams, the Spartans' offense more closely resembles Michigan's, given how heavily Nebraska builds its offense around Adrian Martinez's legs, something you absolutely cannot say about Michigan and Cade McNamara's legs. Thus, we're rolling with the MSU-NW game from week one. It is quite a bit ago, but the personnel is largely still the same and in totality, it should be useful footage. For reference, Michigan State won the game 38-17 after jumping out to a 21-0 lead early on (not unlike the way Nebraska blitzed the 'Cats out of the gate). 

Personnel: We have fixed the problem with making the image big, so it should work now if you click it: 

[NOTE: your attempts at cyberbullying have worked and you have beaten Seth into submission. McNamara is no longer cyan'd]

Northwestern's defensive line sees a good amount of rotation. Adetomiwa Adebawore starts at one end position opposite Samdup Miller, but Jeffery Pooler Jr. also has plenty of snaps under his belt. Sean McLaughlin is the fourth option and he gets on the field too. The problem is, none of these players are good. It's a similar story on the interior. Joe Spivak and Jeremy Meiser are the starters on Seth's diagram, though Trevor Kent has moved ahead of Meiser on the depth chart that Northwestern posts. Those three get the lion's share of the work inside. Between these seven linemen, four will see the field on nearly every play, with the 'Cats running a strictly base 4-3, rarely deviating from having four down linemen on the field. 

The LB level contains the last remaining remnant of 2020's Irish Law Firm, Chris Bergin, who we took mercy on by making him the only LB not to be cyan'd. His compatriots, Peter McIntyre and Bryce Gallagher, were not as lucky. Those three had gotten the bulk of the snaps at the position throughout the season up to this point, but some recent depth chart changes have shaken things up. Khalid Jones is now listed as the starter at MLB on the depth chart, ahead of Gallagher. But since Jones only has 78 snaps through 6 games, we kept him on the bench of this diagram. Don't be surprised if Jones indeed is the new starter on Saturday, though. 

The secondary contains AJ Hampton and Cameron Mitchell as the starting corners who play nearly every play. Rod Heard is the nickel, getting plenty of work each week, but he is not quite the every-down fixture of Mitchell and Hampton. Coco Azema and Brandon Joseph start at safety, with the latter entering this campaign with gargantuan expectations (to be discussed later). Those two starters have each logged a lot of time, though Azema plays a tad less than Joseph, sometimes being lifted for the nickel, or #3 safety Bryce Jackson. 

[AFTER THE JUMP: Has this defense ever seen a zone read?]

Base Set: Northwestern is pretty vanilla in terms of how they line up, giving you mostly the same look on most plays. They usually roll with a generic 4-3 with 4 DB's and that's what we will qualify as their base set. Here's an example: 

You've got your four down linemen, the three LB's, and then four DB's (who are out of the picture). It's boring and generic, but aren't those two good descriptors for Northwestern football anyway? Sometimes they move into a 4-2-5 with a fifth DB coming on the field, but a lot of the time they're comfortable in their base 4-3, typically asking Bergin to move into coverage when needed. Normally this section of the column requires me to take two or three screencaps and explain the personnel shifts and where teams line up their hybrid space players. Northwestern doesn't have a HSP and they don't require a multitude of formation images. Again, boring. 

Man or zone coverage: Northwestern runs a base Cover 2, so they fall into the zone category. You'll see in some of the clips that I show for this piece that their corners give a lot of cushion underneath (I guess you can also infer that from the fact that none of the DB's in the above screenshot are in the picture). The two safeties, Azema and Joseph, play deep (not Washington deep), but they are ready to roll down into run defense when needed. 

Pressure: The Wildcats clock in at 4.22 rushers per snap this week, which is right around the typical average for a given team on FFFF. I'm not a sophisticated enough statistician to have calculated mode and other measures of central tendency for the pressure metric (well, really, I don't have the time to be that thorough), but just going off the rough eyeballing of it, I presume that Northwestern would be the team with the most consistency in terms of pressure of any team I've charted this year. Most teams bounce around from 3-7 rushers on a play, sprinkling in different blitzes and mixing up defensive fronts. Northwestern basically just sends four guys every play (their four linemen... no real deception here), with the occasional five-man blitz. Dull and predictable. 

Dangerman: For this week's dangerman we're going with CB Cameron Mitchell. I came into this piece expecting to name Bergin or Brandon Joseph for this category, but I was not impressed with their performances against MSU, while Mitchell was the 'Cats' best defender, and his PFF grades from this season are generally praise-worthy. Mitchell's coverage wasn't too shabby, especially considering that the degree of difficulty was high in having to keep an eye on the likes of Jalen Nailor and Jayden Reed for MSU in this game. He gives up a completion here on an insane pitch and catch, but he was stride for stride with an elite B1G receiver and in good position: 

CB #2 to bottom

Not sure what else you can really ask for here from Mitchell. Similarly, in this clip, he is again step for step with Reed, and this time he gets the incompletion as Reed misjudges an underthrown ball: 

CB #2 to bottom

Hanging with a receiver who has 6 TDs and is averaging >20 yards per reception this season is a feat in and of itself, but what impressed me the most about Mitchell was his generally strong tackling in run defense. That may not sound impressive, but revisit this section once you finish the whole piece and then you will appreciate how Mitchell was a breath of fresh air for a NU defense that couldn't tackle to save its life in this game: 

This wasn't on a running play, but it was an important tackle of Reed in a situation that plenty of other Wildcat defenders messed up in this game. Northwestern used his tackling ability to activate him in the occasional CB blitz, here coming off the edge to help stop KWIII for no gain: 

Mitchell is not a superstar, but on a Northwestern defense where half the starters have a cyan circle around them, Mitchell is a surprisingly functional corner. 

Overview

"So what's the biggest weak spot in Northwestern's defense?", you might ask. The answer to that question is run defense, and by extension, the front seven/the tackling of everyone not named Cam Mitchell. The 'Cats are currently giving up an average of 205.7 rushing yards per game, which ranks 117th in the FBS, one spot ahead of defensive powerhouse *checks notes* UConn. Between watching this game and doing Nebraska's offense vs. NU's defense for FFFF a couple weeks back, I now have a treasure trove of GIFs of Northwestern's edge defenders getting annihilated by the zone read/misdirection over and over and over again. Nebraska was able to murder the Wildcats by targeting the edges with their running attack that is built on Martinez's ability to properly read the edge. It wasn't much of a challenge, you may recall: 

That's DE Samdup Miller (#91) who gets exposed both times, in poor position, getting read easily, and then too slow laterally to recover once Martinez made the right keep/give decision. Michigan State doesn't have the same kind of QB run attack, but they peppered it in a little bit, and don't worry, it worked just as well: 

In that clip it's reserve DE Sean McLaughlin (#97) who Thorne targets with that QB keep, a good reminder that Northwestern does not have athletes at a number of key positions. I would expect that if Josh Gattis has watched the tape I have, he will have a handful of the JJ McCarthy zone read looks ready to go for this game, because NU hasn't shown any ability to be able to stop them.

Their problems at DE go beyond just zone reads though. Kenneth Walker III was able to slice and dice Northwestern's defense because of his exceptional ability to cut back on a dime and change direction in the blink of an eye. The edges commit to doing one thing on a play and have no way to readjust if the RB reads them and switches it up. For example, on this play Ade Adebawore thinks the play is an inside draw and attacks inside his blocker hard, which KWIII sees and cuts it back, walking into the end zone untouched: 

DE #99 at top of the line

Even if the edges have a correct sense of what the play is, that doesn't mean they will be able to stop it, either due to talent or size reasons. The play right before that one saw Adebawore doing the right thing, but getting sealed off with ease by LT Jarrett Horst, allowing Walker to turn on the jets and get a big chunk: 

DE #99 to top of the line 

Of course, the edges aren't the only problem in run defense. There's also the fact that the defensive tackles are easily ejected from the line too. This play sees DT Joe Spivak get literally sat on by RG AJ Arcuri: 

DT #1 second from the bottom of the line

That looks like when an older sibling agrees to wrestle the measly younger sibling and pins him within two seconds. Spivak is brutalized again by an interior double here, who shove him back into Lake Michigan: 

DT #1 second from the top of the line

The third piece to the run defense catastrophe is Northwestern's lackluster LB play. It doesn't help when your edges struggle to read the play and your DT's are getting ejected, but it's a death sentence when your linebackers can't find the gaps or tackle. On this play, both Gallagher and McIntyre go for the same gap, yet miss the wide open one that Walker runs through for the pivotal 4th & 1 conversion: 

Here we see Gallagher again struggling to figure out where the gap is, running towards the mound of bodies, and not where the seam is opening up for KWIII to sprint through: 

If there was even the slightest amount of deception going on, the defense entered a unit-wide meltdown: 

You may notice #28 Chris Bergin in that play, who starts lined up to the top of the screen in coverage (the white guy lined up at the 10 yard line) and he ends up on the play-side of the field due to his coverage route. But once he's in reasonable position, he way overruns the ballcarrier Simmons, allowing the MSU lineman to take out two tacklers with one block at the five yard line. Just brutal stuff from the LB corps. 

The summation of those issues, edge defenders who can't figure out what's going on, defensive tackles who can be sat on, and linebackers who can't tackle or find a gap, more or less ended the MSU and Nebraska games before they started. The 'Cats trailed 21-0 to MSU twenty minutes in and 21-0 to Nebraska just over eleven minutes in. That's the fatal flaw of Northwestern's defense. 

The pass defense isn't terrible. They rank 42nd in yards per game and are actually top ten in fewest yards per completion allowed. The corners are decent, especially the aforementioned Mitchell. I was not nearly as impressed with Brandon Joseph at safety, who had an immaculate season last year, as I expected to be. He struggled to tackle, like Coco Azema, but both of those guys are not bad in coverage. That said, despite overall decent personnel in the secondary, by virtue of playing a Cover 2, there will be some holes open for a QB to exploit, and Thorne did in this game: 

Soft coverage underneath gives up free yards too: 

Those will probably be there if Cade wants them. 

Despite the defensive ends and tackles being a disaster on the ground, many of them have decent pass rushing grades from PFF, and the tape I saw illustrates why that may be the case. In pass rushing situations, NU's DL was able to give MSU's OL a bit of trouble and get some pressures on Thorne. It's not a high octane pass rushing attack, but they can get home on some occasions like this: 

NU does dial up blitzes every so often, and here's one that worked: 

That said, if Michigan can succeed on the ground, and Gattis tells Cade to focus on picking up the free yards underneath, they shouldn't need to put him in many situations where the blitz is a major fear. 

What does this mean for Michigan? 

This is a good opportunity for Michigan to have an easy game doing what they want to on offense, which is run the ball down the throat of the opposition. The chances to do that have mostly dried up since the NIU game, but we know Michigan's running game is pretty good. They showed that over the first three games, and then again when they ran for over 200 yards last time out against Nebraska. On the flip side, we know that Northwestern's run defense is quite bad. This is the area for Michigan to exploit and it should. If they do so, Michigan can put the game away quickly.  

However, what I don't want to see is Michigan get incredibly conservative. We know from the Rutgers game (and many other games in JH's tenure) that when Michigan doesn't respect an opponent, they stay in the garage and do bland, boring stuff. Rutgers' poor showing against Northwestern last week demonstrated that if you just do the bland stuff against NU, their run defense could be okay. And we know from this column that smart, well-designed plays with some misdirection or reads bamboozle the NU defense. So rather than keeping it bland, I want to see a decent bit of the JJ package, and some well drawn up plays. That way Michigan can surge out to a huge lead and get the game over with, rather than letting another weak opponent hang around like they did last time they were at the Big House. 

Test the edges, use your meat advantage on the interior, keep the throws short and quick, and coast to a victory.