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Muschamp and the spread

Posted by ChrisApplewhite on August 24th, 2008 under Football

Thanks to some award winning Barking Carnival connections I’ve been able to see a few of the closed practices. There is little to report since everything worth watching goes on inside the bubble, and you can’t get in there unless you’re wearing a jersey or have a building on campus named after you. Even so, there are patterns emerging.

Defending the spread is fundamentally an exercise in resource management. Defenses can’t defend everything at once, so on any given play the coaches have to decide what they want to defend and what they want to leave open. Spread offenses take advantage of this by being able to attack everything, so anything you leave exposed will get a roofie dropped in it. You generally get one of two strategies: either man up and rely on your players, or take away one thing and hope the offense doesn’t do other things well enough to beat you. The problem with the former is that there are maybe 5 teams in the country that have enough talent to play football at all 11 positions, and nobody has the talent to do that against a very good team (see: USC vs. Texas). The latter’s problem is that consistently taking away one thing tells the offense exactly what they have to do and takes all the guesswork out of the play (see: UF vs. OSU).

There is no magic pill. Spread offenses are the Mexican immigrants of college football, they stay because they work. But you can fight fire with fire.

The offense works because they can keep you guessing. When you’re unsure, you’re slower. Offenses at the college level and below already have the advantage here. It’s harder to defend than attack, and the lower level (i.e. slower) you are the bigger the field gets, so it’s important to minimize the disparity as much as possible. Don’t try to out-execute a spread team, because it rearry won’t work.

You’ve got to beat them where they beat you — make them play football.

Stop The Run

When he was hired, Gene Chizik pulled a Sean Hannity and proudly announced how we’d stay in our base and dictate the offense because we’re Texas and doggone it we’re the biggest and the bestest and no one tells us what to do.

For whatever reason the problems didn’t manifest on ‘05. The next two years were 13 straight reenactments of the Sisters scene from The Shawshank Redemption. Marcus Griffin played Andy. Chizik wasn’t totally wrong, he just misunderstood the entire concept of what a base is. It’s not three linebackers, it’s two safeties . . . as in 2 deep.

If you want to stay in your base, you can still run a nickel, dime, or Sacajewea dollar. The important part is that you keep two safeties back because of the options the alignment affords you. With a safety down there are really only two coverages you can run: man or cover 3. Both have the same weaknesses so offenses generally know ahead of time where they are going with the ball. The important thing is stopping the run without needing your safeties.

Muschamp’s work with the LBs included a drill focusing on beating blocks and staying strong at the point of attack, something we have never seen at Texas under Mack. Instead of trying to run around the blocker you want to get low, hit him harder than he hits you, and keep your playside shoulder and arm free. If everyone does that the RB has no place to go. It’s like trying to pass a fat midwestern family on the sidewalk.

The second part of stopping the run is to get everyone involved, but without compromising anything. We’ve already seen what happens when safeties get too aggressive post-snap and fall for halfback passes every weekend. During a drill designed to teach proper reaction to a pitch, Duane Akina stood in for a blocker at TE, and on one occasion faked the block and jogged right past Blake Gideon for a long, meaningless gain.

The point he made to them should not be lost. The secondary should always play pass first, and take care of their shit before coming up on the run. If it means the play gets 2-4 yards then so be it, just don’t get repeatedly Griffined. If you’re going to gamble on the run then you had better be damn sure it’s going to be a run.

Confusion

You’ve seen it a thousand times by now. The offense lines up, gets in their stance, then every single member breaks it and turns to the QB for the call. Sometimes they’ll all look over to the sideline to coach calling the play.

Too many defenses won’t adjust. Why would you surrender such a huge advantage to the offense every play? The hardest thing about playing QB is quickly making sense of the mess in front of you. Remove that and suddenly that mediocre QB is winning Heismans.

There are two main ways to disguise your coverage, and neither one is overly complicated or anything anybody doesn’t already know. The main thing is to actually do them, and it looks like we will. The first method is just to line up the same way every time but play a lot of different things out of it, making the QB figure it out after the snap. The other way is to roll to another look at the last second to disguise where you want your strength to be. You can and should do both as neither one is difficult, and they aren’t mutually exclusive. If you want an 8 man front, do it, but run your safety up late. There is no need to plant him 6 yards off the ball and announce where the opening in the defense is going to be.

The first drill I saw them running last Sunday was exactly this. They spent the entire afternoon in a basic cover 2 shell, but they were bringing safeties down and running cover 3 as discreetly as possible. They were just basic assignment drills but it points to a larger philosophy. Defenders don’t have to spend the entire play within a 10 yard box. You can play a deep corner from 6 yards off the receiver. Why anybody lines up 13 yards off the ball this day in age is a mystery, but we saw plenty of it last year.

If you can stop the run with 6 or 7 and allow your safeties to stay back, you can play the same game the offense does. The last 3 years have seen us hand the offense unnecessary advantages. We can only hope that the days of 80% completion rates from 55% type QBs have come to a end.

Cover

In high school you learn to drop to a spot and defend whoever comes through your area. This works for night security guards at a strip mall in Tulsa, it does not work for college defenses.

The best zone defenses are physical and still cover like they are playing man. This is what we’ve seen from Muschamp in the past so it’s no surprise we are seeing it here. It gets tough to tell what coverage we’re in sometimes because of how we play in practice. If I can’t tell from the sideline then the QB is going to have problems, too. Against a team like Tech that adjusts their routes based on man vs. zone it’ll keep them guessing throughout since we aren’t just dropping back and giving it away instantly.

The concept isn’t complicated. Redirect the first guy that runs through you, then clamp down on the second guy. Under Chizik we had players who couldn’t possibly have covered their assignment (Michael Griffin vs. Anthony Gonzalez), and under Akina we just the same thing but worse because of the spot drops. It’s important to cover receivers, not grass.

In another controversial change from last season, we’ll be playing DBs actually capable of covering people. Deon Beasley is probably just under Huff and right with Rob Babers as far as pure cover ability, and he’s shown he can be more dynamic than Babers ever was. Earl Thomas and Ben Wells can both cover (once Wells fills in whatever gap is letting Gideon start over him, watch out), and depending on who is opposite Beasley at any given time, we might have 4 guys who can all play on an island.

Chykie Brown is an NFL talent, but apparently has a learning disorder, or the short term memory of Guy Pierce in Memento. Ryan Palmer is adequate but will stick out like a sore thumb with the rest of the guys. Curtis Brown is an athletic freak but hasn’t seen much action, and Aaron Williams is a future superstar who is 18 years old. The coaches are high on our group of safeties, so we’ll only need one of these CBs to round out and play well since Earl Thomas apparently has the slot/nickel position locked up.

Palmer gives us a 50/50 shot on passes in his direction so if either C. Brown or C. Brown beats him out we are in really good shape.

Pressure

Spread offenses like to gloat that they can isolate you in space. Well guess what fuckers, that street runs two ways, and it runs through the ghetto. Yeah we have to cover, but now you have to deal with Teh Motherflippin’ Kindle in space, which is the football equivalent of brushing your teeth then eating an orange.

When you have an athletic freak who is bigger, faster, and stronger than everyone else, you don’t sit the guy because he doesn’t know where to stand in coverage. How do you take advantage of raw talent? Easy, send him at the QB. Your other option is to make sure he rots on the bench so he never gets better while playing a guy who maxed his potential in 11th grade and won’t ever be able to do the job. It’s up to you, really.

We’re planning to use Kindle as the bludgeon to strike fear into opposing QBs. Sometimes it’ll be as a DE, but in our 3 man line packages he can be moved around and blitzed from different places. Making the defense find him on every down means that much mental energy is used on something other than the play.

Against teams like Tech and Missouri who use very wide splits, you could even use him, functionally, as a DT. There is so much room that Kindle will be able to go left or right and be a pass rusher right up the gut (Barking Carnival not responsible for severe reoccurance of mugging-related PTSD).

The fact that he is a LB and not a DE means we can pick out the weakest OL and let him tango with Sergio. Hopefully he carries a rose in his mouth while he plays. That is how you dictate an offense and make them adjust to you. It is not matching up a linebacker on Danny Amendola.

 

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28 Responses

  1. Uh Um said:

    August 25th, 2008 at 4:10 am

    “Against teams like Tech and Missouri who use very wide splits, you could even use him, functionally, as a DT.”

    If you go back and watch last years Tech game, that’s exactly what he did. A couple times he got clotheslined (one was called), a couple of other times he almost got there but didn’t. Harrell does a good job of getting the ball away quickly or buying time by falling away and throwing off his back foot. But certainly you want to hurry him as much as possible. Thanks for the insight.

  2. Parlin Hall said:

    August 25th, 2008 at 5:06 am

    Great post, CA. I can’t decide whether it’s more entertaining than instructive, or the other way ’round–clearly a mark of its quality.

  3. TexAgs Gets Lose! said:

    August 25th, 2008 at 5:29 am

    No moving flash diagrams? I’m insulted.

  4. dedfischer said:

    August 25th, 2008 at 5:38 am

    Great info, Chris. Since I spent most of my high school LB career, careening my head into centers and fullbacks from Panhandle teams running Wing T offenses in the early 90s, today’s advanced coverage schemes are something I’ve had to learn about from mostly reading and watching Ron Jaworski (awesome) on Sunday mornings. I know you are on board with me in that playing a base nickel or 4-2-5 alignment is the best method for defending the run against a 4-wide set in order to prevent your MLB from playing the unenviable task 2-gap responsibility. With this assumption, could you draw up what a Cover 2 scheme might look like with that alignment using one of your fancy-moving-dot-thing-a-ma-jiggys, so we might have an idea of how this plays out in the wild? I’ve got a good grasp on the Cover 3 and man scenarios, but would like to see Cover 2 with a nickel package drawn up.

  5. Big Satan said:

    August 25th, 2008 at 5:41 am

    Best line in the article:

    Spread offenses like to gloat that they can isolate you in space. Well guess what fuckers, that street runs two ways, and it runs through the ghetto.

  6. uthookem said:

    August 25th, 2008 at 6:11 am

    I nominate this gem for best line: “Spread offenses are the Mexican immigrants of college football, they stay because they work.”

    Great work.

  7. El General said:

    August 25th, 2008 at 6:23 am

    I nominate this gem for best line: “Spread offenses are the Mexican immigrants of college football, they stay because they work.”

    Or it could read, “Spread offenses are the Mexican immigrants of college football, they exist to make old white guys money.”

  8. vvn8bs said:

    August 25th, 2008 at 7:04 am

    We have used William Moore as you describe Kindle’s role to great effect, especially against Tech. He blitzes, he plays line backer, he plays man on the slot. From what I understand from camp, Moore will be used in a variety of spots on the field to try to keep him in a space and confuse the opposing QB. Eberflus has done a great job over the past couple years being creative in his looks.

  9. Kafka said:

    August 25th, 2008 at 7:16 am

    “Muschamp’s work with the LBs included a drill focusing on beating blocks and staying strong at the point of attack, something we have never seen at Texas under Mack. Instead of trying to run around the blocker you want to get low, hit him harder than he hits you, and keep your playside shoulder and arm free. If everyone does that the RB has no place to go.”.

    I understand how this works when you have a big strong LB who is comparable in strength to the blocker but what if the blocker is much stronger and bigger than the LB? My experience as a TE in high school was that the hardest part of blocking an LB is making solid contact.

    The LB going low only works so far because eventually the LB gets too low to make a play.

    The gaps between LBs are pretty large and you are not going to make too many tackles with one arm free. Is the idea for LBs to tackle the runner while he is still in the hole and constrained in his movement? This implies the LBs are really aggressive in coming up to stop the run. Doesn’t this leave them really vulnerable to play action passes?

    What is the approach the LB is supposed to follow if he is trying to tackle in space? Maybe still to hit a blow to the blocker but give ground slowly until the runner breaks or D help arrives?

    A big thing an LB has to do is to keep his head up during contact to know which way to break and to keep the blocker from getting into your body (i.e. keep the blocker at arms length). This does not seem very compatible with hitting the blocker low.

    How does Muschamp address this? Maybe the strategy was to hit a blow and then reestablish space between the LB and blocker?

    In the Muschamp scheme are LBs primarily focused on stopping the run (since there are 5 DBs and only 2 LBs) rather than pass D? the trend has been for LBs to get smaller and faster, which makes it even tougher for an LB to directly hit the offensive lineman and not get crushed. Maybe Muschamp believes in bigger, stronger LBs (like Kindle) who can hit an offensive linemen directly all game long and not get crushed.

  10. Scipio Tex said:

    August 25th, 2008 at 7:49 am

    Allsome post, Chris. This is exactly why our defense should shave 20% off of our ppg allowed despite playing much better offenses this year. Your observations about Muschamp zone vs. Akina/Chizik zone is dead on. Zone coverage is covering a receiver in a defined area. It’s not standing like a border collie paralyzed by an invisible fence.

  11. Orangeblood said:

    August 25th, 2008 at 8:29 am

    Depth chart vs. FAU released:

    http://www.mackbrown-texasfootball.com/sports/m-footbl/spec-rel/fb-depth-chart.html

  12. ChrisApplewhite said:

    August 25th, 2008 at 11:38 am

    Kafka -

    The reason you want your playside half free if so you can shed the block and run in that direction. LBs can outrun OL usually, but sometimes you are just going to have to stand your ground, and when you do you’ll have to rely on leverage and fundamentals to allow your pursuit.

    LBs are taught to press the line so they are making contact as close to the LOS as possible. This is one reason Bobino might be starting since it’s the one thing he does well. Your goal is to just make one big mess of players in front of the RB. Doesn’t always happen that way, but the first step of shedding a block — perhaps the most important part of run defense — always starts to agressive contact and leverage.

    “This does not seem very compatible with hitting the blocker low.”

    Well most LBs are shorter, but mostly it’s using your legs to get low. You want your back straight and your head up. Most coaches value hip flexibility in the front 7 for this reason. Leverage is twice as important as strength.

  13. Kafka said:

    August 25th, 2008 at 12:46 pm

    Chris,

    My experience, having played MLB, DE, DT (and nose tackle on goal line D), is that it is OK for defensive linemen to make a mess in front of the runner but LBs are expected to make tackles.

    What I’m trying to understand is whether Muschamp coaches that the LB gets low and delivers a big blow to neutralize the behemoth blocking him or is the LB coached to hit the blocker a bit higher with his arms extended. My experience is that you never let a blocker get to your body if you can help it. Once the bodies are close, it is much easier for the blocker to hold unobserved and maintain contact.

    With zone blocking/running, how does the LB even know what playside is going to turn out to be, i.e. the runner doesn’t know where the crease is going to be so how can the LB?

    I’m trying to understand how the LBs can be so aggressive on run D (i.e. trying to hit the LOS at the same time as the runner) when there are such a high percentage of passes compared to run plays and it isn’t even clear where the hole/crease will be. Do the LBs in Muschamp’s scheme just have less pass D responsibility?

    Sounds like a good topic for film study.

  14. ChrisApplewhite said:

    August 25th, 2008 at 2:47 pm

    All I can tell you is what I’ve seen from practice where it was LB vs. LB in drills. They were definitely delivering blows with the shoulder. It might’ve just been for FBs and TEs.

  15. ChrisApplewhite said:

    August 25th, 2008 at 2:49 pm

    “With zone blocking/running, how does the LB even know what playside is going to turn out to be, i.e. the runner doesn’t know where the crease is going to be so how can the LB?”

    It doesn’t matter where the RB ends up, just that you are protecting your gap. The goal is to give the RB no place to go regardless of the play.

  16. Scipio Tex said:

    August 25th, 2008 at 7:16 pm

    You’re also reading the first step of the OL. Presumably they’re trying to cut you off from where you want to be running.

  17. Kafka said:

    August 25th, 2008 at 8:32 pm

    Chris,

    I appreciate the input and realize that you can only pick up so much from one practise.

    Scipio,

    I don’t think you can always tell a lot from the offensive linemen’s first step in a zone blocking scheme. The OL is not necessarily blasting a specific hole but is just maintaining contact as long as possible while the TB figures out the best crease to attack.

    The reason why the UT running attack seems kind of slow to develop its because the TBs are trying to figure out where to cut.

    I studied the last UT-Ohio State game video pretty intensely (to see how we do against a good D) and was amazed at how long the UT OL maintained contact (not creating a hole but just taking the DL guy whereever he could be taken (kind of like Ju Jitsu, I guess) and how meticulous the UT backs were in picking creases to run. Everything was a very fine tolerance and required a lot of patience.

    To ask an LB to deal for an extended period with an OL guy who outweighs him by 60 to 80 pounds is asking a lot.

    I understand the concept of protecting your gap (which is something that Ohio State does extremely well) but it is not easy because the whole line may slide sideways quite a ways during the play (i.e. the gaps are moving).

  18. HenryJames said:

    August 26th, 2008 at 7:07 am

    What Al Groh says:

    We talk all the time to our players about “having no creases.” If you asked any of our front seven defensive players about our defense, I think they would answer very quickly that they allow no creases. Do not give the offense seams to push the ball into. That is what runners are looking for. It is like water finding cracks in your basement. They will find those creases if they are any good. So our defense is a no-crease defense.

    The way you prevent the creases is you beat blocks. You cannot constantly be on the edge of the blocker. At some point, whether this is a blitzing linebacker, an up-the-field runner, or a two-gap defender, you have to take him on and you have to beat him. In other words, there is a point, as we like to play football, where you have to kick his ass. You have to stay in front of him, take him on, and beat him.

    H/T to Trojan Football Analysis.

  19. Kafka said:

    August 26th, 2008 at 11:32 am

    Henry,

    Thanks, good stuff. I’ve started reading it but have not yet completed it.

    What intrigues me is whether Muschamp, by reducing the number of LBs and increasing the number of DBs, has made pass coverage much simpler for LBs (no deep stuff, just a shallow zone) so that they now can focus more on the run.

    This would mean that you can afford to play bigger LBs who can actually deal head on with some OL guys and commit to the run more quickly. This would counter the trend toward smaller/faster LBs.

    It is usually not that difficult for an LB to get out of the way of an OL guy in space but the difficult thing is to first engage that OL guy head on, neutralize his push, maintain your space (both with respect to gap resonsibility and between you and the OL guy), and not go to the left or the right until you know which way the runner is breaking. This approach is more like how they do it in the NFL where the LBs are big guys. Obviously, if you can do it, it is a more fundamentally sound way of playing D (i.e. much less guessing about where the ball will end up).

  20. Kafka said:

    August 26th, 2008 at 1:04 pm

    Henry,

    That is actually a great article (now that I’ve had a chance to read it). Groh employs a 3-4 but it looks like he uses his 2 interior LBs like Muschamp is going to use his two LBs in the nickel.

    As I suspected, this scheme requires enormous LBs. Groh does use enormous LBs (250 lbs) who, indeed, attack OL men head on. The approach they use is to get downhill as quick as possible (i.e. run as fast as they can toward the particlar lineman they will attack) to generate momentum.

    Groh does not explain how this works, so I will. Momentum = .5 * mass * velocity squared so the 250 pound LB can match the momentum of the 300 pound offensive lineman if the LB speed is about 10% greater than the speed of the OL. This is because if the velocity of the LB is 1.1 of the OL man, then V squared is 1.21 (relative to the OL guy), which makes up for the 20% more mass the OL guy has compared to the LB.

  21. ChrisApplewhite said:

    August 26th, 2008 at 4:21 pm

    It’s not about mass. All you’re trying to do with the initial contact is stun the OL enough to be able to get away from him. If you’re fast, you’ll be able to get yourself in better position to do this.

    defending the zone is different from other schemes, just like one-gap defenses are different from two-gap. They both force every defender to be able to handle himself. We haven’t had a LB that could do that in awhile. Not even DJ, I’d say. A coach that addresses it will instantly win a spot in my heart.

  22. Kafka said:

    August 26th, 2008 at 5:29 pm

    You did a great job of understanding what Muschamp is coaching.

    Having said that, size matters. When somebody tells you that its not the mass, its the motion, they’re just being nice.

    At the instant of collision you have two masses that have a certain momentum. The one that has more momentum is going to very briefly push back the mass with less momentum. There is very little “stunning” on the line, immediately after the collision the offensive lineman is going to resume pushing. The OL guy will be quite difficult to control for long if the LB is much smaller/weaker.

    When defending a zone running scheme, the LB may have to maintain gap control for quite a while (while the runner is trying to figure out where to cut) without the advantage of that initial momentum (which is a product of half the mass times the velocity squared). So for the initial instant of contact, the velocity can dominate. After that, mass (and strength) become very important. At that point the LB needs to be big enough to deal with the offensive lineman. It is hand to hand combat and there is a reason there are weight classes in martial arts.

    A coach can take this approach only if he has the personnel that can do it (i.e. smaller LBs need not apply).

    I don’t know if you read Groh’s article that was linked to by HenryJames but I highly recommend it. He explains why he wants big LBs in this scheme and that the primary responsibility of his interior LBs is to defeat blocks and stop the run. So these LBs are optimized to stop the run and have much less responsibility to stop the pass. I think this is exactly what Muschamp will do when lined up in a nickel with 2 LBs.

    We have all seen plenty of Ds where small LBs avoid contact with offensive linemen and fly to the ball. The trend toward small LBs was not because these guys are better at dealing with offensive linemen.

  23. Beergut said:

    August 26th, 2008 at 7:32 pm

    The prioblem with using those bigger linebackers is that they are slower to catch the RBs when they get outside.

  24. Beergut said:

    August 26th, 2008 at 7:34 pm

    As for stopping the spread, I say stop screwng arouind with it, put a 3-5-3 out on the field, show them you have more athletes on the field than they do, and good luck to your QB when he’s in the hospital.

  25. ChrisApplewhite said:

    August 26th, 2008 at 9:14 pm

    Speed will always beat size because you can’t be bigger than someone who isn’t right in front of you, if that makes sense.

    a 300 pound OL doesn’t care if the LB is 210 or 240, he’s still going to be stronger. All you need from a LB is to be able to outrun an OL, and if it comes to it, be able to get under his pad level and bounce off. Don’t underestimate how much leverage matters.

  26. Kafka said:

    August 27th, 2008 at 10:16 am

    Beergut,

    Yeah, there are always tradeoffs. There is no perfect scheme and it is always about the matchups.

    In the Groh scheme, the interior LBs are optimized for run stopping inside the box (what he calls the bubble) and there exist two outside LBs to deal with the run outside (I actually focused more on the responsibilities of the inside LBs in the article since it was a meaty article so I’m not totally up on the outside LB responsibilities in the Groh scheme).

    I assume, if Muschamp actually takes the Groh approach with his 2 LBs when deploying the nickel, DBs (I hope safeties) are going to have to support the run on wide runs.

    Re: the 3-5-3, it seems to me that it would have problems against pass oriented teams (i.e. almost all of the big 12). I don’t believe that LBs play pass D anywhere near as well as DBs. Obviously you could play some safeties as LBs and that might solve that problem.

    When Muschamp plays a nickel, he will deploy two really great pass rushers at end with Sergio and Orakpo. Besides Miller, everybody else on the horn D line could play DE or even LB (in the Groh scheme stressing powerful LBs). They are probably going to be able to zone blitz very effectively.

    IIRC, the aggies played a nickel last year and the LBs had to deal with OL a bunch. What approach did they take? did they take the Groh approach and just blast into the OL as fast as they can as soon as they read run (i.e. defeat the block head on, not run around the block) or did they do something else? How did it work out?

    Chris:

    Speed kills and, you’re right, you are not bigger than somebody you can’t contact. For most big football players there is nothing scarier than having to deal with a fast guy in space.

    Let’s use the Groh article HenryJames cited as the context of this conversation (because it provides an explicitly defined explanation/reference for this philosophy of LBs attacking OL). The Groh approach is that LBs attack OL directly with as much speed as possible to generate as much momentum as possible to stop the OL guy in his tracks. the LB then stays and fights the block until he knows where the ball is going (i.e. “no creases”).

    You are correct that this collision also may give a good opportunity for the LB to separate a bit from the OL guy. It is not a given however that the LB will be able to separate from the OL guy after the collision. There is a definite risk that the collison may put the LB in the OL guy’s world. Leverage is no magic solution because the OL guys know about leverage, too. They live in a world of leverage and are used to fighting DTs and DEs (the badasses of the football world).

    In Groh’ scheme, the LB actually stays in there and defeats the block (i.e. he does not run away from the blocker after the initial contact). This is why, in Groh’s scheme, the LBs are so big and powerful.

    When dealing with zone blocking/running schemes that are so popular now, a lot of patience is required by both the O and the D. The OL stays with its blocks a long time. The runner may take quite a while to pick his crease. The D has to maintain its zone responsibility (according to the Groh scheme where LBs attack OL) for quite awhile. this means the LB does not get to hit OL and run, the LB has to stay there and fight the block directly.

    If you ask a 210 pound LB to get in the pits (where men are men) and fight a roided up 300 pounder for 60 minutes, it is going to be a long day for the 210 pounder. Even defensive linemen can get exhausted by the 4th quarter after dealing with huge OL guys all game long.

    Even for Sergio, a 240 pound monster who is super strong, it might be a lot to ask for him to attack OL guys directly all game long. More likely Muschamp will be multiple and this approach of LBs attacking OL directly will be something that will be used in an unpredictable way when the right personnel are out there to do it.

  27. MU_LAX said:

    August 29th, 2008 at 5:34 am

    Thought you guys might be interested in this article on William Moore and using hybrid defenders to stop the spread O.

  28. HenryJames said:

    August 29th, 2008 at 5:42 am

    Five years ago, Eberflus is shopping the Bootheel, checking on a recruit in New Madrid. Shawn Jackson, a coach from a nearby town, shows up with a tip: You need to check out my guy at Hayti.

    I’m not sure I understand a word of that.

    Similar story about how Bob Stoops offered Demarco Murray.

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