DEFENSIVE RECAP: 2023 Maryland
Tony White is the Master of Disguise
Glossary of Terms1
Link to Charting Sheet2
Tony White was wearing a disguise early in the game against Maryland.
The Nebraska defensive coordinator was content to play generic and conservative defense throughout the first half, with deep shell zone coverage on 70.4% of first-half snaps and few blitzes or pressures (extra rushers on just a third of the plays, about in line with Nebraska’s season average). Maryland found some — relative — success against this lack of aggressiveness, with a 40% success rate resulting in a touchdown and a couple other deep drives.
But in the second half: Mask off.
White brought an extra rusher or a pressure on **27 of 39** plays in the second half, a rate of 69%. Nebraska’s average rate entering the game had been a little over 30%. And he was especially aggressive to close the game, bringing an extra rusher or pressure on 21 of the final 24 plays. He also shot the man coverage rate up to nearly 60%, abandoning the umbrella-like zones for more aggressive one-on-one matchups. It was a mirror image after halftime.
It’s hard to argue it didn’t work. Overall for the game, plays where Nebraska brought an extra rusher or pressure had a 70.3% success rate, and its overall man coverage success rate was 72.0% — both notably higher than Nebraska’s overall defensive success rate of 62.1%. The Huskers were at their best Saturday when they went aggressive.
Two particular aggressive calls White was having success with Saturday were sim pressures and creepers. Both have fancy names but are essentially the same thing: Plays where the defense rushes four players, but one or more of the players who rushes is someone who wasn’t expected to pre-snap.
Some of these plays are called “creepers” when they occur with the team in a base defense look. So, for instance, a team in a Bear front that rushes its middle linebacker but drops its two edge defenders into coverage:
Four rushers are still coming, but not the four you’d expect from that pre-snap setup, and it’s out of a base defense. So it’s called a “creeper.”
They’re called “sim pressures” when they occur out of a pressure package or pass-rush look. So, for example, a team in a double A-gap mug alignment that rushes one of the mugged-up linebackers but drops the other and one of its defensive linemen into coverage:
Four rushers are still coming, but not the four you’d expect from that pre-snap setup, and it’s out of a pressure package. So it’s called a “sim pressure.”
Creepers and sims are generally thought of as an attempt to confuse a good quarterback. By dropping unexpected players into pass coverage and bringing rushers from strange spots, you’re changing the picture of what the quarterback expects from the defense after the snap. It’s an attempt to trick or confuse a QB into a mistake — either by throwing into a window that suddenly has a defensive lineman dropping into it or from not clocking a rusher and taking a sack.
White called creepers and sim pressures a combined 15 times Saturday, a season high. The previous season high was 13 against Colorado, another team that wanted to spread the ball out and let its strong quarterback pick apart coverage. The creepers and sims Saturday comprised 22.7% of Nebraska’s total blitzes; it was only 18% against Colorado. The creepers/sims were also more effective Saturday (66% success rate) than they were against the Buffs (61%).
Where the blitzes came from Saturday was also an outlier from White. Entering the game, White had brought pressure generally up the middle of the offense: 59.8% of his blitzes had gone into the A or B gaps3. But Saturday, the focus was much more on outside blitzes: The majority of White’s pressures against Maryland went into the C gap4 (52.6%), while just 47.2% of his blitzers went into the A and B gaps. White brought *seven* corner blitzes alone on Saturday; per my charting, he had only brought four corner blitzes in the previous nine games before this combined. The only game with more outside blitzes than this was against Northwestern, but that was purely because of sheer volume, as White brought 40 total blitzers in that game.
It was also an aggressive game from a coverage and secondary structure perspective. Nebraska’s usage of single-high safety shells was at 60.6%, among the highest rates of the season, around the usage against Michigan (60.4%) and Michigan State (69.8%). The difference comes in that the two Michigan schools were run-happy teams, and the secondary was largely aligned that way to bring a safety down to put another defender in the box to stop the run. Maryland is a pass-happy team, though: The Terps dropped back on 41 of their 66 plays and called run-pass options on another seven snaps. White was getting into single-high Saturday *to play the pass.*
This primarily translated into a lot of Cover 3 usage. Nebraska used Cover 3 on 43.9% of its snaps Saturday, trailing only the Michigan game — again, a stopping the run thing — and was just ahead of Minnesota. The season average entering was 27.9%. I hate speculating on White’s mindset, but I imagine he liked the three-deep zone element against Maryland’s dangerous downfield passing attack. That would explain why he also ran it so much against Minnesota, too, as the Gophers were also rolling out a strong receiving corps. And Cover 3’s four underneath coverage defenders concentrated in the middle of the defense — as opposed to the flats or up the sideline — was probably beneficial against the Terps’ heavy usage of those little slot quick screens (and other screens). But still, why he used so much C3 is a little confusing and would be a good question to ask him.
The decision to use so much Cover 3 wasn’t super effective. The C3 plays had a success rate of 51.7% (the lowest of any coverage Saturday) and gave up most of Maryland’s big passes. Nebraska’s zone coverage as a whole had its second-least efficient performance of the season — just a 53.6% success rate overall — but zone is generally less effective against good quarterbacks.
NOTES
Changing up Cover 2 and Cover 6
I mentioned in my Michigan State recap that the Spartans had come up with a designer passing play to beat how Nebraska was playing Cover 2:
and that White was going to have to adjust how he ran it to avoid giving away tendencies. He did:
Nebraska showed a few new variations Saturday of how it was dropping into Cover 2, likely in response to teams starting to find answers and tells against it.
The first rep in the video above was how Nebraska has been running it, with the boundary and field safeties each playing a deep half, and the Rover safety coming down into the box to serve as the hole player:
The notable difference is that the linebackers underneath didn’t widen before the snap, something they had been doing and you can notice in the Michigan State video above.
The second and third reps change up who drops deep:
Instead of the field safety taking the deep half (in green), they stay close to the line, with the corner (in orange) — who had previously been up at the line playing shallow — instead dropping back into the half. The linebackers also don’t widen here.
On the final snap, White changes up the shell NU is dropping into Cover 2 from:
Here, it’s a single-high safety look before the snap, but one of the down safeties (in orange) hauls backwards to make it to the half to setup the normal FS-BS deep, Rover down alignment. The LBs (in yellow) again don’t widen.
Adding some variety to how he was getting to this coverage was good from a purely tendency-breaking standpoing, but these little tricks/disguises ended up generating a couple big plays. But also got burned for the long pass before the half to set up the touchdown, as the rotation didn’t get to the receiver downfield in time. That’s the risk you run in rotating coverage like this.
Tagovailoa Cookin’
It’s worth mentioning the strong individual quarterback play NU was facing Saturday. Maryland’s Taulia Tagovailoa is probably one of the 20 best quarterbacks in the nation, and a big jump over the passers Nebraska had faced during its last five games. Nebraska gave up seven explosive plays Saturday — about dead-on with its season average rate of allowing explosives — but those explosives went for an average of 27.1 yards, including gains of 53 and 43. And two of the shorter explosives converted a third and 16 and a third and 15. All four of these were just great plays by Tagovailoa against otherwise sound defense, either by him getting an accurate pass off into a blitz, finding an open receiver on second-reaction, or fitting a ball right in the window of a coverage rotation. The long scramble in the third quarter was particularly impressive, as NU had a seven-man pressure on there with Cover 0 behind it. A lot of QBs freak out against C0 — including Shadeur Sanders several times earlier this season — but Tagovailoa diagnosed it, sidestepped the blitz, and ran for a huge, key gain. A lot of NU’s big negative defensive plays Saturday, I was more impressed with his performance than mad about anything bad NU did.
Return Of Drop 8 (Sort Of)
Nebraska’s rate of using its package where three players rush and eight players drop into coverage — wildly successful early in the season — had fallen off in recent weeks as NU had prioritized utilizing more four-player fronts. NU had played just six total snaps of “Drop 8” against Northwestern, Purdue, and Michigan State.
It made a minor comeback against Maryland, getting five reps against the pass-happy Terps. The Drop 8 package got just two successful plays, though. It had entered with a success rate of about 67.1%. A sample size of five isn’t much to go on, though. It has a chance to be used some more against the new Veer and Shoot scheme from Wisconsin, though.
Odds And Ends
Maryland’s average third down Saturday was 9.91 yards, the second-highest length for any opponent this year, behind a (pretty hilarious) 11.8 yards for Northwestern. Nebraska’s success rate on third and fourth down against Maryland, though, was only 71.4%. That was only the fifth-best mark of the season. Not terrible, but considering the length Maryland had to go to convert, NU let them off the hook on some money downs.
The pass-rush personnel grouping featuring James Williams got 14 snaps on Saturday, a season-high and almost all on third downs. Eleven of those plays were successful.
Nebraska was solid against dropback passes (65.9% success rate) and against designed runs (61.1% success rate) but really struggled against run-pass options, or RPOs (42.9% success rate). It was a small sample of only seven RPOs, but NU had previously been dominant against RPOs this year (66.7% success rate entering Saturday). Hopefully — and likely — just a blip.
Nebraska used defensive line stunts on around 12% of its plays Saturday, which would be the third lowest mark of the season behind Colorado and Louisiana Tech. Stunts are generally a tool a defensive coordinator uses when he feels his pass rushers can’t win their one-on-one matchups, so less use of them means White trusted NU’s line to beat Maryland’s, as he did with CU and La. Tech.
**PROGRAMMING NOTE: I’m travelling for the holiday on Thursday, and with the Iowa game being on a Friday, I’m planning on getting the Wisconsin recap out in one combined offense/defense post by Thursday morning. I should still have time to do the charting, but I’m going to be up against it for time on the writing, but you will get some sort of post with the data.**
Yards Per Play measures how many non-penalty yards NU allowed on a possession divided by its non-penalty snaps. Success Rate measures how often NU prevented a gain of 50% or more of the yards its opponent needed to convert on a first down, 70% or more of the yards its opponent needed on second down, or 100% or more of the yards its opponent needed on third or fourth down. An Explosive Play is any designed run that gains more than 12 yards and any designed pass that gains more than 16 yards. A Havoc Play Allowed is any tackle for loss, sack, fumble, interception, pass break-up or batted ball.
The gaps between the offensive center and guards and guards and tackles.
The gap outside the tackle or between the tackle and the tight end.