Positioning. When you’re a defender preparing to take on a block, you typically take it on in a way that allows you to keep a specific arm free. You do that by attacking a specific side or “shoulder” of the blocker. It’s often about setting an edge and forcing the ball to go a certain direction. It’s a little detail that has a huge impact, and Pruitt wants players that pay attention to the small details.
Defensively, you use your inside shoulder to engage a ball carriers outside shoulder to funnel plays back inside.
As a defense you're either boxing or spilling on containing the ball. If you're spilling, you have a force player that either has to make the ball carrier cut it back to the alley or make the ball carrier go deeper and wide. attacking with the wrong shoulder as the force player almost always totally [uck fay]s you on defense because neither one of these things happen, so the offense out leverages you.
While true, we’d be doing a disservice not to point out that they’re much much better than where they were the first 4 games.
Problem is, their 230 lb rb cuts back and has 5 yards before anybody touches him. Saw Bituli, Sapp and ignont try to shoot upfield aggressively, looking like we have plenty of defenders and it didnt matter.
And the problem is, and you’ve heard Pruitt say it, is if one guy fails at his job the whole play fails.
This all makes a lot of sense and I hadn't heard it before. It must make all the difference between containing runs to between zero and 3 yards, and having them bust long ones all day.
It’s why people refer to football as the “ultimate team sport.” A lot of times it just takes one guy not doing his job for the whole team to fail.
Bad LB play was a staple under Butch and they’re just now beginning to take to coaching and not the freestyle bs. While they could still engage blockers better, they’re being asked to do a lot when OLs are freely getting to them off the snap.
Playing so few seniors makes the value of any potential bowl practices that much more important, given that apparently there are a multitude of nuts and bolts that these guys weren't being coached on before this year.
I glanced at 247 last night to see what line commits we had and saw that he's 6' 350. He's a tree stump
I get what you’re saying but it’s not that simple either. Most DL is going to be playing BDSD if you’re spilling. This is to push the ball carrier to your force player. This was why Shoop was such a train wreck. It was really conflicting styles of play going on with butch having a heavy influence and it became an inept bastardized system.
