The 4-2-5: Part Three

Step away from the ledge after that basketball game and read about some defensive secondary and blitz tendencies in Rob Aurich's defense.

Photo courtesy San Diego State Athletics.

This post will wrap up a series charting out Rob Aurich’s defensive scheme at San Diego State and comparing it to recent NU coaches’ philosophies, with this part focused generally on the secondary’s alignment and coverage and the blitz/pressure package deployment. Parts 1 and 2 are linked below, with the initial post focused on general, big-picture takeaways and the second post getting into some specific charting figures about the personnel and the front seven.

You’ll probably want to read those first! Part 1 is free to read, but Parts 2 and 3 are behind the paywall:

To summarize Parts 1 and 2:

• In the first post, I made the case that the “4-2-5” scheme Aurich is bringing with him from San Diego State is actually closer to a 4-3 that subbed its field outside linebacker for a safety body and got into its “two-to-rotate” back-seven philosophy that relies heavily on match-based Cover 3 and Cover 4. I also discussed its limited use of blitzes and rushers but its (relatively) high percentage of sim and creeper pressures. And I talked about what some benefits and downsides of playing that way might be.

• In the second post, I got into specific data on the personnel usage, fronts, shifting rate, boxes, shells, rusher totals, and stunt rates of Aurich’s 2025 San Diego State defense. Specifically, how static and streamlined all of the usages were compared to NU’s pretty multiple scheme the last two years. In Aurich’s scheme, we’ll see almost exclusively base personnel, 4-2 shells and four rushers used on standard downs. The two exceptions were a reliance on light boxes (that I posited was due to SDSU’s good personnel relative to the Mountain West) and aggressive stunt rate that was over 40% of snaps.

This post will focus exclusively on the safety shells, safety rotations, coverages, press rates, pressure rates, pressure locations, simulated/creeper pressure usage, and pressure package alignments.

Hopefully this gives everyone some insight into how the defense operates ahead of the spring game.¹ As always, subscribing to the paid version of this newsletter gets you access to these last two posts — plus all future paid posts, the full archive, and commenting on posts — and is just $5 a month and $50 a year.