Defense Insight: Know the Breakpoints of the O/D
Sep 05, 2022 3:27 pm
Coach ,
The season is off to an exciting start with college football in full swing, high school football being played across the country, and the NFL starting this Thursday with the Rams vs.Bills.
And today may be Labor Day, but football coaches labor on labor day, so it’s a good time to learn a few tips and adjustments to help our team improve this week. Here are three ideas to help your defense get better.
#1) The Break Points Move - Do You Adjust Yours?
We all love to learn from the best; in doing so, best practice gets shared in clinics, and we adopt them. One that seems to get standardized is how we look at situational football.
At East Carolina, the Pirates take extreme pride in winning 3rd down. Their goal is to be the best in the nation and they set their goals to accomplish that.
They want to be 70% successful on dense and that would be good enough to be one of the best in the country. In 2021, they were 68% on third down, making them #2 in the AAC and #12 in the country.
They are off to a good start with 69% success in their first game against # NC State (9 of 13 times they stopped #13 NC St.).
What helps them achieve this is to not start with a set break point of the situation, but rather allow the opponent’s calls to do that. What defensive coordinator Coach Blake Harrell has found is that those breakpoints will move week to week.
Planning this way allows you to hone in on calls that will be specific to the approach of that particular offense. Coach Harrell explains how they do that here (click on image for video):
#2) Know Your Defensive Break Points to Defend Against Tempo
A smart offensive coordinator will understand where your breakpoints happen and what the shift will be in your attack when the ball hits that area of the field. Many times that’s in the red zone and the strategy shown on a film breakdown is that you bring more pressure.
The smart offensive coordinator will also use tools to keep you out of what you want to do and a simple one is to go as fast as they can once they are in that area. He wants to force your defense into a base or vanilla call to keep the heat off his offense.
So one way to do it is to be sure that you can play your base well in this situation if it happens. That means you need to be sure that it is practiced against tempo and everyone is assignment sound. Penn DC Bob Benson shows how they do that in this situation here (click on image for video):
However, maybe you do not want the offense to dictate that you play base. The best way to do this is to have a plan for that. We talked last week about matching their tempo procedures with your own. This would be a great time for you to have a one-word call prepared.
Think about any of those times where you have shown that you will make certain calls based on the situation, and have a tempo answer for it. It may not happen this week, but sooner or later a smart OC will give tempo a shot at keeping you out of your call.
#3) Finding Ways to Get Pressure on the QB with Less = Win for the Defense
Notre Dame played a bend but don’t break philosophy against Ohio State to limit the explosiveness of the Buckeyes’ offense. The idea was to force the QB deeper into his progression and force him to try to throw intermediate throws. There were even times when the Irish only rushed two. It definitely disrupted the rhythm of the OSU offense.
In order to do this, there still has to be stress placed on the offensive line. One way to do that is with line stunts by moving the guys you do have upfront and rushing.
It’s something that D3 #24 Heidelberg Defensive Coordinator Branden Jakubcin believes in.
This past weekend they did a great job of limiting Adrian’s pass offense. Heidelberg recorded 3 sacks, an INT limited the offense to 133 pass yards, and has 3rd Down Success Rate of 69% (11 of 16).
He uses the Tite Front and Rip/Liz Match as his base and likes to get to the QB with Stunts. In this video he shows how their simple “Swap” stunt accomplishes that objective (click on image for video):
Have a great week, keep learning and advancing your defense, and enjoy the time you have off today with your family!
Always be growing!
Coach Grabowski and the community of Coaches helping Coaches
P.S. Any resources we share in this series have a temporary discount if you want to dig deeper into the concepts. Find these clinics here.