Getting Defensive

Remember the week after BYU laid a beating on Tulane, a week after upsetting Oklahoma. Kirk Herbstreit said BYU had a tenacious defense, a solid offense, etc. He put BYU at #5 in his AP poll for that week. Every BYU fan I know was excited. We finally had a D to go with our typically potent O. Against TCU, the O looked more impotent. And the D hasn't had a dominating performance since the second week of the season.

What has changed? The personnel and coaching staffs are the same, other than ONE significant injury. The whole coaching approach has changed.

Against Oklahoma, BYU brought 5 or 6 guys frequently. They brought two guys in the same gap, or they lined 3 guys up over the tackle and he didn't know which one to block, even if BYU only rushed 1 of the 3. On the play when Sam Bradford got hurt, OU had 2 linemen blocking 3 guys on the left side, and 3 linemen blocking 1 guy on the right. That's a confused O-line and coaching staff. Result: getting pressure on the QB so your DBs don't have to be as good.

Now: BYU brings 4, MAYBE a 5th one. But there is no disguising the blitz. The O-line and the QB knows exactly who is coming and what gap they are trying to come through. That makes it easy to get the right play call and the right blocking scheme.

Against Oklahoma, the CBs moved up and back: sometimes they were up near the line of scrimmage, sometimes they were 5 yards off, other times they were 10 yards off. Sometimes the corners took the flat, sometimes they had deep, sometimes they played man.

Now: BYU's CBs are between 7-10 yards off the ball. They always have deep third. There is no man coverage. There is no bump, there is no mixing it up. There is no confusion. You give a Division-I WR a 10-yard cushion and a D-I QB 4-7 seconds to throw the ball, and you are going to give up a lot of yards and a lot of big plays. And you aren't going to get a lot of stops.

That is BYU's D now. It is good enough to beat the bottom half of the MWC, but, as we've seen, it isn't even close to good enough to beat TCU, Florida State, and it won't be good enough against Utah. High risk, high reward: that was Bronco's philosophy as a D-Coordinator. Now he subscribes to the low risk, low reward philosophy. It will cost BYU at least one more game this season if it doesn't change. Don't get me wrong: I love Bronco Mendenhall, I love what he was done with this program. But I don't love the sit back and wait for them to screw up strategy, especially against athletically superior and better-coached opponents. I miss his mindset. I miss his suicide blitzes. I miss the safety getting in the backfield. I miss the defensive players running the option down the field after a turnover. BYU needs to get aggressive on defense again. Otherwise, TCU and Utah will run away with this conference for the foreseeable future. BYU will become the buffer between the Horned Frogs/Utes and the rest of the conference.