Virginia Tech's secret defense that shut down OSU
Ever wonder if Tech's win in Columbus against last year's NC was more than an early season fluke? Well, apparently, holding J.T Barret and Ezekiel Elliott to their lowest production of the season was no accident.
Very interesting read on the special defense they used, thought I'd share. I wonder if anyone else tried this against OSU last year, or if B1G opponents this year will?
The article linked is a synopsis from Fox Sports and is fairly technical, way over my head, but might be fresh meat for some of the more expert football members here . Link cites an even more technical source, XandOlabs.com, that offers premium content mostly for coaches.
Has anyone ever told you your avatar looks like he's yanking open his pants to look at his junk?
Well now someone has.
No, but usually rival fans ask me if that's Taylor Martinez throwing a pass...
Is that Taylor Martinez throwing a pass?
OMG, I am so embarassed, you made me look.
Attributing this to X's and O's is ridiculous. JT Barret was in his second game. Anyone who thinks Virginia Tech would make it into the 2nd half against the team that played in the title game, or even the one that went to East Lansing, is clinically insane.
The two aren't mutually exclusive. Ohio State still only averaged 2.7 yards/carry, and Ezekiel Elliott had just 32 yards rushing. I don't know why it's difficult to believe that Bud Foster, who's a very good defensive coordinator, might have had something to do with it.
Speaking of mutually exclusive, has the performance of the passing game never had an impact on the performance of the running game?
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Everyone is aware that they're not mutually exclusive. It's a discussion of relative weightings. Of course if Bud Foster sent them out there in a punt block formation every play the results would have been different, but that doesn't mean the argument has been decisively made that the results would have been much different under any other reasonable defensive alignment.
Ultimately it's your choice on which you think is more important, but I see JT Barrett's inexperience as a much bigger factor than where the VT players stood before the ball snapped.
May have been that VT's Secondary, they always have great DB's, was able to cover well enough to limit OSU's passing game, and allow them to play with the extra man in the box, and shut down OSU's running game.
"I see JT Barrett's inexperience as a much bigger factor than where the VT players stood before the ball snapped."
Each man is entitled to his opinion, but you're talking about a guy who was on his way to being in the Heisman discussion. He didn't seem too awfully inexperienced for the rest of the season, but magically, Virginia Tech made him look pretty bad. I think a lot of credit goes to Bud Foster.
bud fosters a beast. it helps tech typically recruits D heavy and have been using similar blueprint for 15+ years. not to mention they can almost always deploy armies of quick, aggressive and versatile athletes (at all 3 levels) - many from hampton roads / tidewater area which certainly helps.
theyve had been one of funnest Ds to watch for years (shame their QBs always seem to let down top 10 Ds 1-2 games per year). its tough to compare osu in sept vs dec, just as its tough to knock foster / beamer and that D
You do realize that the OSU team that went to East Lansing was taken to the 4th quarter by 5-7 Michigan and 4-8 Indiana, right?
the moral victory card. play it! We aren't what our 5-7 record says we were, dammit. and they shouldn't be nat'l champs. lmfao.
Wow. Talk about completely missing the point of my post.
just thought it was dumb. Just because UM was within 7 pts at the start of the 4th quarter, didn't keep OSU from running away w/ that game. And it certainly doesn't mean OSU was bad. They could easily counter that it's hard to get up for scrub teams and it showed their mental toughness that they could shake it off and take care of business when they had to. Also, UM always plays OSU close as it's supposed to be a rivalry game (hasn't been in many moons). OSU blew out IU by almost the same score, maybe same thought process. Not sure how you figure a close score at some point in a game is indicative of OSU being susceptible when the final score demonstrates they blew both away.
Yes, you did miss the point. Badly. I was responding to the argument that Virginia Tech would not have kept it close against OSU for the first 30 minutes if they had played the OSU team that faced MSU, which is refuted by the fact that even worse teams like Indiana and UM kept it close into the fourth quarter after Nov. 8th. My post literally had nothing to do with moral victories, whether or not OSU was bad, or the final margins of victory. I'm guessing that you simply neglected to actually read the exchange.
How'd Cardale do in his second game?
+100.
I believe another team tried the same things the next week and had 0 success. VT was successful because they were going against a RS freshman QB who was starting his 2nd game and hadn't practiced for what he saw.
You mean 2-9 Kent State's Bear defense didn't work against Ohio State?!?! Who'da thunk.
J.T. Barrett was still a redshirt freshman when he played Kent State the next week.
There's not really much of a secret to this. OSU struggled because JT Barrett was in his second career start and was playing behind an almost completely replaced O-Line from the year before. Va Tech wasn't a very good team, but Bud Foster is a great defensive mind, and he knew exactly how to frustrate an inexperienced QB.
If that game was played again at the end of the year, Va Tech would not have made it into the second half.
This is definitely the popular opinion, but I'm not so sure I buy it. In the three games after VT, Barrett threw for 14 TDs with a 75.7 completion percentage. He was a good QB at the time and just played a shitty game because the coaches couldn't figure out Foster's defense. I don't know why that would be any different later in the season.
It wasn't that the coaches couldn't figure out the defense, it was they hadn't prepped for it at all and it messed with the QBs reads. Only so much you can do at half time with a QB in his 2nd game. Later in the season, when the OL was better and the QB more experienced, they would have had more options to adjust to, especially in the running game, and a QB more comfortable with the offense.
Why would they have prepped for it any more later in the season? They obviously didn't see it coming. And sure, OSU would've had more options to respond, but why wouldn't we say the same for VT's defense?
I'm not necessarily saying VT would have won the game later in the year, but given that both Michigan and Indiana took OSU into the 4th quarter, I'm not sure how people can say that VT, a team that actually beat them, wouldn't have been close past halftime.
I don't disagree with your last point, OSU was a team that peaked at the right time, with young players who improved and gelled as the season wore on and it wasn't until the last few games that everythig came together. Before then they were certainly beatable.
And why doesn't that go both ways? Virginia Tech was only in their second game of the season. I don't know what their lineup looked like, but they presumably had young guys who were somewhat inexperienced out there. It's a pretty complex defensive scheme, yet they were able to pick it up and prepare for a national championship-caliber coach/team.
That we had a reshirt Senior, 5 star QB with playing experience, a returning, for the most part, O-Line, and a hot shot O- Coordinator from Alabama, and yet we looked like a team with a Freshman QB, a retooled O-Line, and Mortimer Snerd as the O-Coordinator.
Yes, coaching is very important in all sports, but even more so in College Football. It is, more often than not, the difference between winning and losing, after the last eight years, that should be apparent to even the most obtuse.
This is pure clickbait by Feldman. Since when is a bear front a secret? Foster didn't even come up with the idea himself, he stole it from Ole Miss. Having read the actual case reports on X and O labs, it seems to me they got lucky that Barret didn't have a good game and that OSU's offense as a whole was inexperienced. If they run this defense next year against OSU, I predict a lot of pain for VT.
a) There's rarely anything "new" in football. Everyone steals ideas, concepts, etc. It's a matter of picking and choosing what works for your players and your coaching staff. Foster deserves credit for finding something that worked (whether it came from Ole Miss or Grand Valley State) and implementing it properly.
b) It's kind of silly to say "If they run the exact same thing next year, they won't do as well!" Well, of course not. If any competent coach knows the opposing team's playbook, that makes things quite a bit easier.
from his Chicago Bears days
OMG i had no idea
A) That was exactly my point, Feldman calling it a "secret" is dumb. You can give Foster credit for implementing it all you want, but he didn't create anything.
B) Then why does GT lead the country in rushing all the time? Paul Johnson sells DVDs on how to install his offense. His play books are online. There are even youtube videos of him explaining his offense. Every defensive coordinator in the country knows exactly what they are doing. Must be all those five star recruits.
Paul Johnson's playbooks are online in the same way that the Patriots playbook is on Madden 2015.
As an OC that runs the flexbone triple option, who has one of his playbooks and has read the ones online, I'm sure you know more about this than me.
Relax there Sparky. No need to be so serious.
And yeah, Johnson's base offense is no secret to anyone, but do you really his scouting report every week is "fuck it, let's just the same thing every week regardless of the talents of the opposing defense"? Like every coach, he has plenty of wrinkles to adjust to defenses.
a) Well, nobody else was able to shut down Ohio State the way Virginia Tech did, so there must be something at least slightly unique about it. You know that there are multiple ways to run a Bear, multiple ways to run a 4-3 Over, multiple ways to run a 3-3-5, etc.
b) Georgia Tech leads the country in rushing because he's a really good coach and not many people run the triple option. Yes, people know his playbook, but it's a unique offense. Lots of people run Bear defenses as part of their defensive packages.
They gave up over 300 yards of offense. VT sold out to stop the run and get after a young QB and it worked well for them, but saying they took Urbz lunch money is a bit much. Getting your lunch money stolen is rushing for -27 yards. Is it so hard to beleive that Urban Meyer is a good coach and even a good coach with an inexperienced team can lose a game?
"VT sold out to stop the run and get after a young QB and it worked well for them."
So Bud Foster put together a good game plan? Got it.