Mack’s New Strategery: Defense

Fine analysis. The only minor issue I take is that Muschamp did utilize corners blitzes. For example, A.Williams on Bradford early in 2009 RRS?

Granted, with Diaz’ youth and short resume we don’t have much to go on. However, I don’t know that I would parse his first presser so carefully. The fact that so many endorsed him to Mack, apparently unsolicited, says a lot to me about his intelligence, energy, and ability to learn quickly. I suspect these qualities will allow him to snap pretty quickly to the issues you mention. Let’s see how he does.

Hey, man, the only defensive metric that matters is 3 turnovers a game – can’t do that sitting back in some lame-ass zone!

Seriously though, you may have valid concerns but I’m going in with faith that Diaz will be able to smartly utilize
the weapons at his disposal. Pressure with Jeffcoat and Wilson and space eating from Randall just make sense, and should give smarting foundation around which to play sound defense. I like the idea of multiempossiblemblitzers making the QB and OL do mental gymnastics pre-snap followed by unpredictable pressure from amdifferent 4-5 guys on most plays.

Wow, iPhone fought me every step of the way on that post.

Wonder what difference it will make to have Gray on “his” staff. Hard to get my head around Gray taking orders from a guy this young, who never played, and has been a DC at a BCS school exactly one year.

I think programs like UT and OU would kill it with the 4-2-5. I’m of the opinion that any scheme that plays outside contain with the DEs against a spread offense is obsolete. Think how many sacks you could rack up with guys like Orakpo, Kindle, English and Beal, if all they had to worry about was rushing the QB. Kindle has trouble walking down the stairs, so teaching him to make quick and accurate reads on the outside can be counter productive. Plus, TCU has never had DTs like UT and OU can recruit, which would only magnify the effectiveness of the scheme.

Had a discussion on the Tech message board the other day about which was the hardest player to recruit and the majority vote went to DT. I was the lone vote for DE. It’s much easier to find a 270-lb high school kid and bulk him up to a 300-lb one gap run stuffer than it is to find a 6’4", 240-lb kid that runs a 4.6 and can run around the wide splits/quick release of the Big 12 offenses. Don’t believe me? Count the number of Big 12 DTs playing on Sundays versus the number of pass rushers. I can name probably a dozen DTs, but Orakpo and Brian Robison are the only NFL pass rushers I can think of. Miller and Beal may boost that total though.

It seems you are making a lot of assumptions about Diaz’s defensive strategy based on two comments in his presser that could largely be up to interpretation.

I know he likes to get after the QB, but I don’t know why that necessarily leads to the assumption that he brings the house every play and abandons the CBs on an island.

Manny Diaz had a pretty good scoring defense at MSU with a poor offense and barely adequate talent. He’ll be careful enough to win, but he’ll also dial up the pressure from unexpected places. He gets it. Confusion reigns supreme.

This is the hire I’m most concerned about too. But I think you’re reading way too much into his press conference statements. The point of these conferences is not to lay out your strategy or even your philosophy, The goals are more tactical: Create nice, concise sound bites for the media; reassure the fan base (which is done with statements that stir the emotions, not the intellect); project that the new guy understand the problems with the old regime (to wit, turnovers and big plays), etc.

“…If those are your highest values you will tend to embrace an all-or-nothing approach that helps the offense secure either a quick score or total failure…”

bingo.

This is also a slight concern for me as well.

Take a look at these stats from Miss St 2009 (pre Manny) to 2010 (post Manny). While he was able to improve total defense, sacks and TFL (moving the y-on-y national rankings up 8, 44 and a whopping 72 slots, respectively), this was counterbalanced by a fall of 26 points in pass defense (even though pass efficiency defense improved 17 slots). While I do not claim to be any kind of football sabermetrician (I will leave it to those much , I do think that this translates into more pass yards given up (big plays); however, pass defense efficiency improvement also tells a story of more INTs and lower pass completion percentages.

If you look at his 1st, 2nd and 3rd year stats at Middle Tenn, you will also see the same geneal trend (more or less).

That said, I’m hopeful that last years defensive performance puts us in the “there is no way to go from here but up” category.

Nickel Rover,

Check this this, I think it may lend a little more structure to your initial reaction on Diaz:

http://brophyfootball.blogspot.com/2011/01/manny-diaz-bulletproof-fire-zone.html

If you are not a fan of pressure defenses, then I assume you were a big fan of the Texas defense last season, which by most metrics was actually not great. A stay-in-your-lane, rush the passer with four was what I saw a lot of last year which included defensive linemen simply occupying offensive linemen at the line of scrimmage. If you do not apply pressure, quarterbacks are free to stand back there and pick you apart (see Okie Lite). Corners will be put on an island in this defense, but they should welcome the challenge and with the talent level we have been able to recruit to corner in the last few years, it should not be a huge problem.

I obviously would love to have Gary Patterson’s defense as well, but seeing as virtually no one has been able to duplicate what he is doing makes me think there is something else going on other than what he says to the press. Football, more than any other sport, is a copy-cat industry and if it was easy, everybody would be doing it with 3-star recruits. If I had a bad ass defense every year I would also try and make everyone think it was super easy to create so they could all feel bad when they can’t replicate it.

I think it’s fair that we might see Diaz realizing he can get the pressure he seeks with 4 considering the athletes we have on roster. Lets assume he’s not stupid.

And with the quality of safety play last year, weren’t our corners really on islands all season anyways?

I’m loving the idea of tons of pre-snap motion on both sides of the ball.

I like the hire more than Nickel and I think a lot of the rhetoric coming out of the Diaz presser was tinged in placating Mack, specifically the emphasis on creating turnover.

I also don’t expect Diaz to blitz as much. This is the first time he’s had top of the line talent, how do we know what he’ll do? It’s one thing when you’re at Middle Tennessee State playing Miss St., or Miss St. playing Auburn, it’s entirely different when it’s Texas playing Tech. I fully expect Diaz to shit himself when he grasps just how much talent he has to work with.

Let me complete a thought from my above post (darn work interruptions!). I will leave the complete in in-depth parsing of defensive stats to those more astute at this than I…

This is also a slight concern for me as well.

Take a look at these stats from Miss St 2009 (pre Manny) to 2010 (post Manny). While he was able to improve total defense, sacks and TFL (moving the y-on-y national rankings up 8, 44 and a whopping 72 slots, respectively), this was counterbalanced by a fall of 26 points in pass defense (even though pass efficiency defense improved 17 slots).

This could be misleading. I’m no expert on Miss St and can’t say I watched them much the last 2 years, but perusing their depth charts I see that in 2009 they started 2 sophomores, a junior, and a senior in the defensive backfield while in 2010 they started 1 junior, and 3 first year starters (2 sophs and a RFr). That could also account for the big plays given up at times.

His general defensive tendencies also are reflected in his teams defensive performance at MTS, as well. At MTSU we have a much larger sample of performace—4 years, and it can be agrued that he had time to recruit for his ‘system’.

I’m not jumping to any conclusions about whether this is good or bad. It is just information with which to send through our intellectual gears until we see the proof in the pudding, next fall. It is also to remember that there is no one set of statistical defensive measures that can guarantee Ws (I’m sure someone will prove me wrong here)… :)

“Hard to get my head around Gray taking orders from a guy this young, who never played, and has been a DC at a BCS school exactly one year.”

First of all, hopefully Mack wouldn’t hire someone with an ego problem. However, if Diaz’s NFL career has some how destroyed his ability to compromise, I’m sure Diaz will concede when necessary and continue to be a “sponge”, trying to take every bit of knowledge he can from Gray. Diaz is way too young and has been far too fortunate thus far to be ‘too good’ to take advice. His humility and ability to quickly recognize good advice is exactly why he’s achieved the success he has. I get the impression that Diaz will be far more critical of himself than Gray and he won’t be trying to give Gray “orders” — more like “respectful requests”.

Check the link and post by LH Scot above if you want a deeper understanding of what Diaz brings to the table. A 20 minute press conference isn’t a great way to make a judgment of the scheme that he brings in.

This hire could turn out to be a slight upgrade over Muschamp.

D’oh — obviously I meant “Gray’s NFL career”.

One thing that is going to help our D tremendously, regardless of the DC, is not having to go up against a Gred Davis O in practice every day. Harsin’s O will chanllenge these guys as much as any O they’ll face all year.

Good hire or not, I don’t think sound bites are the best criteria to judge him by. We’ll see how it all shakes out.

Fine analysis, but it rests on this:

“Judging by his press conference…”

Not sure it’s ever wise to take a coach’s public pronouncements at face value. Most have developed a line or two of palaver for public consumption. And if Diaz does turn out to be lame, JG is sitting right there in the next chair. So, Hook ’Em!

What Wyatt said.

New DC’s have mandatory Bull Durham statements they must make immediately after being hired. “Blitz the QB from all directions!” “Attack! Attack! Attack!” “Aggressive, not passive (like his predessor ALWAYS played)!” “Make the offense react to us!” “We’ll never play bend but don’t break!”

It doesn’t matter the new DC runs nothing but 8 deep zones with 3 man rushes – at the opening press conference he must sound like Jerry Glanville. Fans love it. Hence the overwhelming positive reaction for Diaz.

That said NR, while I agree people may be reading his reading his early statements too positively, I think it’s still a stretch to read them as negatively as you are. Best just to ignore them as he was reading from a script that was written at least 30 years ago.

Joe James nails it: there are canned announcements DCs have to make. Has anyone ever seen a DC announce that his squad will play read-and-react defense? How about that they’ll play bend-don’t-break and wait for the inevitable mistakes by the offense?

I generally agree with the analysis, but I do think it’s based on presumed frankness on the part of Diaz. Frankness is not really going to happen with a new coordinator.

OldTimeHorn nailed it, this kind of analysis is absurd. Why don’t you wait until Diaz installs his system before you judge? Frankly I don’t even get your point.

One other thing, if I’m annoyed as an OC it probably means that things are not going so well, I’m having to go outside my confort zone and earning my paycheck with blood sweat and tears. Perfectly valid strategy imo! It’s easier to win a game when the opposing offense is not running smoothly than the other way around, is it not?

“Frankly I don’t even get your point.” I think he’s just talking football on a football blog.

It’s fun to read some football stuff, I’m getting tired of discussing if the grounding of the plane to Wisconsin means Bostad got cold feet or not.

Good article NR…Good comments by all…My take is that Diaz was providing some good sound bites, for the media, Mack & boo$ter$. The proof will be in the pudding. Let’s see what this & JS’s (‘Cosm) blog say once Spring ball starts up. I think we’ll get a better sense of what type of “D” Manny is installing.

I’m hyped-up by the hires to-date…Let’s see who the OL coach is…

Burnt Orange Wookiee, Agreed. I rather read about football than the latest dot that appeared on AWACS. But what’s the point of talking football when your assumptions are based on conjecture? This is what I don’t get, I feels it’s pointless to even discuss Diaz’s scheme at Texas when we’ve never seen it. I would much rather Nickel Rover analyze Diaz’s past defenses and discuss what could or couldn’t work at Texas, than parsing a pr event. Imho, this article is not BC good.

There are some Diaz pressers on Youtube from early December – MSU’s pre-bowl period – in which he says pretty much exactly the same stuff he said at the UT presser. Hit the QB, stop the run, do what annoys the OC, etc. So he’s established his talking points and it’s not specific to UT personnel and opponents. It may just be that this is what he says to the press because he knows the press will react positively to it.

Longhorn Scott – neat link. About time someone chalked some X’s and O’s on this blank slate. Looks solid to me, but I’m not the expert.

I obviously would love to have Gary Patterson’s defense as well, but seeing as virtually no one has been able to duplicate what he is doing makes me think there is something else going on other than what he says to the press.

Who’s been trying and failing?

Meddlesome, I frankly don’t agree with Nickel’s analysis myself. That said, I wouldn’t call this an absurd piece of work. It’s still a logical analysis, he’s broken down some sound bites and interpreted them best he can while offering his opinions. This still isn’t anywhere close to ESPN bloggers talking about every tweet Lebron James makes, this was the introductory press conference of our DC. An important enough event that it seems logical to listen to what he said, and have an instant reaction.

Instead of “analyzing” what he will do by his press conference, how about watching some of his defenses?

Nickel Rover, I’m surprised that you read so much into the Diaz press conference. I like the hire – a lot. We wanted youth and energy, and we’ve got that now.

Burnt Orange Wookie, even better than reading about Texas football is watching Texas football. I just ordered Bevo-D and have turned on Texas-OU 2005. It is easy to forget the speed and quickness of that team’s execution. Charles is taking it to the house! Say goodnight, JC.

That team simply demoralized opponents.

Hook ’em!

Give Nickel Rover a break people…the point he’s making is perfectly valid. He’s talking about Diaz’ stated philosophy. While hard game analysis has its merits, we can’t be sure that the defenses Diaz ran at MSU or MTSU will be the same as what he’ll run at Texas. We’re hiring him because of his smarts, i.e. ability to innovate. What won’t likely change is his coaching philosophy, i.e. the fundamental things he wants the defense to achieve.

Personally (as I said above) I suspect Diaz’ take is an intentionally vague description, meant mostly to brew up excitement without getting into X’s and O’s. But at the end of the day you have to take someone at their word. I think Nickel’s right to be a little concerned that Diaz takes his own words too seriously, because his goals do seem a bit elementary on their face, as Nickel Rover outlined. I’m not too concerned myself, but I’ll still be a bit anxious on opening day to see whether the D is aggressive to a fault.

Tdiddle, wanna send me some Middle Tennessee or Miss. St. gametape? I intend to pay close attention to what we do schematically on the field, we haven’t taken the field yet.

Let me address some general reactions:

-Nickel, you should take so much from the press conference, he is just telling the media what they want to hear to create excitement. No one announces a bend don’t break strategy.

Gene Chizik did. Anyways, you can tell from the language of a coordinator what his schematic principles are even if he doesn’t use obvious language like “base defense”, “Cover-2”, or “bend don’t break”. If it turns out Diaz doesn’t follow the principles he laid out in his press conference then cool, either way I’m not sorry for discussing them.

-If there was a scheme that universally worked, people would do it (in reference to Patterson, etc).

This line of reasoning is the laziest and worst in all of the social sciences. If you are a fan of this argument, for anything, do you know humans? Are you active in a workplace? Humans routinely ignore what works best for whatever is more comfortable to them. They don’t always analyze what strategies are best and when they do they frequently misinterpret the data.
Many coaches are particularly arrogant people (like say, Rex Ryan) and will very slowly come to accept that their base philosophies are anything but correct.

I agree with dedfischer that the 4-2-5 can work remarkably well at a university like Texas, Diaz is used to manufacturing pressure with less talent. Here, with Patterson’s schemes, you could do maximum damage by just unleashing guys like Orakpo at the QB.

Patterson’s scheme is built on simplicity, execution, and being faster than your opponent. They get by with this in the Mountain West because of outside of a few teams they are athletically superior across the board and most teams that face them repetitively don’t have the athletes to punish the defense.

The people in Fort Worth are damn glad Michigan hired who they did because TCU was not looking forward to going out to San Diego to play that game next year with a rebuilt TCU.

You can’t beat the better teams given a vanilla look again and again and it will be interesting to see how Patterson adjusts when they starting playing the Big East.

Rod Wright. Touchdown, Texas!

So many deserving players on our 2005 team won a National Championship ring.

Hook ’em!

Davey O’Brien: I think you might have missed the Rose Bowl.

I read the Brophy post, sounds like Diaz is very good at simplifying modern zone-blitz defense to college kids. That’s great and will probably confuse many a Big 12 quarterback, if you aren’t running some zone-blitzes from time to time I don’t know what’s wrong with you.

My concern is whether he has turned that into a base defense and whether he will still rely on a lot of 2 deep coverages to protect our young secondary and offense….which I think he should.

Nickel Rover

Go to SECsports.com. go to video and you will be able to watch complete games. I see 3 on the front page of the full games section.

3 for Miss St. that is

That is an excellent and unexpected development. Thank you Tdiddle.

Nickle,

Watched it from start to finish and I believe TCU benefited from Wisconsin going away from the running game. Go back and look at the San Diego St. game and see how a team that has seen TCU’s defense knew how to attack them.

Davey:

Agreed. In 2008, OU ran the exact same hitch and go route to Manny Johnson (!?!?) for THREE touchdown passes. That’s not Ryan Broyles or even Kenny Stills. That’s Manny freakin Johnson who roasted the TCU secondary. The third time, everyone in the stadium knew it was coming, and OU still turned it into 6.

I read the Diaz ‘Cripes’ link posted above.
What I took away from it was…

…the butt shot.

The rest was WAY over my teeny football head.

“Value no. 1: To lead the nation in wins.

Criterion: What annoys offensive coordinators the most?"

Always nice to see a fellow debate nerd.

Java, very much agree. I need to pop in a Texas football DVD sometime. It’s been too long since I’ve seen us look really good.

Playing one safety deep puts more pressure on the run offense than two deep. Nick Saban agrees with me. It’s more than just the Cover1/2/3 FireZones etc… it’s how the defense works together to limit the offense. CB positioning, horizontal/vertical leverage, varying attacks, etc.

The 4-2-5 may be a better base, but the underlying concepts matter more. Based on Diaz’ FireZone concepts, he’s somewhat a mirror of Harsin. Multiple looks, simple concepts. Execute.

LongCat: You caught me, I couldn’t resist when I noticed how his philosophy progressed like an Lincoln-Douglas Case.

Buzzard Lips: You are definitely right on both counts, but stopping the run is neither as important in the Big 12 as it is in the SEC nor nearly as difficult.

Fire zones are excellent and should be incorporated in every defense, but I prefer a base strategy of 4-2-5 with lots of 2-deep zone coverages for all the reasons mentioned in the article. The fact that Diaz seems to have a method for teaching it to college students is definitely a good thing and I’m sure he’ll have some success here. But the 1-high safety looks are hard to execute in this league unless you have some great safeties. When we did it with Earl Thomas, money. When we did it with Scott/Gideon we were porous on 3rd down.

The biggest argument for going to a 4-2-5 at Texas is the personnel available. You’ve got Gideon-Scott-Brewster-Vaccaro-Phillips-Jackson-Cobbs-Diggs as potential contributors at safety. Safety seems to be a lot easier to recruit in Texas than linebacker or even corner. Give me a lineup that gets Vaccaro-Phillips-Scott on the field.

whats the difference between “being a 425” and simply being a multiple 4 man front?
Is TCU 1-high or 2-high?
“what they do” on defense (TCU) isn’t anything different (when its all said and done) than what all other defenses end up with versus any given receiver split, just that most other defenses are more concerned with matching personnel groupings.