Previously: Rutgers Offense

Derrick Green ran for 6.2 YPC against a better Rutgers defense in 2014. [Adam Glanzman/MGoBlog]

While Rutgers' offense will have the team's most important absence if Leonte Carroo can't suit up Saturday, the defense has also been weakened by injury and general Rutgersing. NFL-quality DT Darius Hamilton, already playing out of position at the nose on an undersized line, is out for the year with a lower-body injury. The entire starting secondary turned over due to graduation and significant legal issues.

An undermanned Rutgers defense is about as good as you'd expect; they rank 114th or worse in three of Bill Connelly's four factors on that side of the ball. Wisconsin tore them up for 6.5 yards per play and 48 points despite an iffy performance from Joel Stave.

Personnel: Seth's diagram [click to embiggen]:

Three returning starters are concentrated in the front seven.

Base Set? 4-3 under for the most part, though they'll also play an over front. On passing downs they often go to an aggressive six- or seven-man front:

They tend to blitz out of that look.

[Hit THE JUMP for the rest of the breakdown.]

Man or zone coverage? Mostly soft Cover 2 and Cover 3 zone, with man coverage mostly mixed in when blitzing. There were a lot of intermediate throws available against Rutgers' zone coverage, especially over the middle.

Pressure: GERG or Greg? Rutgers played pretty vanilla on standard downs before dialing up pressure on obvious passing downs.

Dangerman: While weakside linebacker Steve Longa gets most of the hype for amassing high tackle totals, strongside linebacker Quentin Gause looks like the better player to me. Gause is more active in the backfield, in part because of his position, but he's also less likely to take a poor angle to the ball—Longa's aggressiveness occasionally burns him.

Sometimes that aggressiveness pays off. Longa is quick to react; here he flies in for a TFL when the D-line creates a pile of bodies and Longa instantly recognizes the lone available gap:

Longa's pretty good, though his tackle totals are inflated because so many plays get past the D-line to him; he can also take some bad angles to the ball. Gause is more likely to stone a running back in the backfield and less likely to miss as assignment.

OVERVIEW

Because they're undersized up front, Rutgers plays an aggressive one-gapping style with their defensive line, looking to generate penetration with slants and the like because playing straight-up doesn't usually go well. This has major boom-or-bust potential. Sometimes a lineman or two will knife past a block and kill a play dead:

Sometimes the offensive line uses their momentum against them and springs a big play:

MIKE Kaiwon Lewis (#14) and FS Anthony Cioffi (#31) also played this horribly.

The defensive tackles alternated the occasional disruptive play with far too many instances of getting escorted downfield and away from the hole. WDE Djwany Mera was also up-and-down. SDE Quanzell Lambert is a decent player; he was the best lineman at generating pressure on his own. That's not much of an accomplishment on this team: pass-rush specialist Kemoko Turay leads the team with two sacks, and his came against Norfolk State and Kansas. Turay saw scattered snaps, didn't generate much pressure—he's got a good speed rush but Wisconsin's tackles could just shove him past the pocket—and got obliterated on a couple runs. Stave usually had all day to throw.

The linebackers are the strength of this defense. Gause and Longa are mostly covered above; Gause holds the edge well and is the toughest of the front seven to keep blocked. Lewis had a couple really nice plays, including a Peppers-like dodge of a block—if it works, it works—to make a tackle in space; he also opened up some big runs by taking poor angles to the ball. I thought most of Rutgers' issues in coverage were on the defensive backs instead of the linebackers; while the LBs got good depth and stuck to their zones, the safeties were slow to close on passes over the LBs and the corners didn't always recognize when they needed to sink back out of the flat and provide some help.

Rutgers' corners had a tough time defending Wisconsin receiver Alex Erickson, who finished with six catches for 103 yards and a touchdown; he got a big gain early after beating a jam easily, and after that RU mostly shelved any attempts to play man press. They'd break it out again later only for nickel Andre Hunt to get beat by Erickson and fall over, allowing a 31-yard touchdown on fourth-and-seven. The corners are beatable deep when they dare to play man and their zone coverage leaves something to be desired.

The safeties were just bad. Cioffi took several terrible angles to the ball; he's the safety on the far side on this Clement touchdown:

That was far from an isolated incident, and Cioffi also had a handful of passes completed in front of him when he looked late to react to what he saw in coverage. Strong safety Kiy Hester came up and laid a couple impressive hits, but he also had his problems. One of them gets the full play breakdown treatment...

PLAY BREAKDOWN

Hester is at the far right of the screen, creeping up from the ten. You'll also want to watch the nose tackle and Longa (near-side linebacker).

Wisconsin runs a quick pitch to Clement with two linemen pulling out in front. There are already problems—the guy you see completely turned around on the near hash is, in fact, the nose tackle, who got bashed out of the play in an instant.

A big seam opens up for Clement as Mera is sealed off to the inside and the edge defenders have been successfully kicked out. Both inside linebackers are in pursuit, but they're about to be wiped out. Lewis runs smack into pulling guard. Longa is impossible to see in this next frame because he decided to take a sharp angle upfield to the ball.

There's Longa in the middle of the chaos. His pursuit angle took him into a lineman, however, and now he's caught way upfield with no chance of making the play. Hester, meanwhile, has for some reason decided his best angle to the ball involves running into a lineman who's already blocking someone.

Hester maneuvers around the block, but by going outside of it, he leaves a crease that Clement can hit if he turns on the jets.

Which he does.

Goodbye.

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