coachjohnson
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Every defense has a goal of keeping their opponents to 3 and out. With today's offenses its a lofty goal but it begins there. Most teams will even go with amount of yards to be given up or even the amount of points to keep an opponent under. Turnovers are also a key component of the goals of a defense. The defenses have to work a great deal harder than offenses trying to adjust what they do from week to week with the different offenses they will face week in and week out. The offense change some blocking assignments and look at ways to exploit defenses based on what the D gives them, but they try not to change what their doing by using plays they already have that attacks weak spots in the D's. Which makes the D's job even harder. The O will do what the O can do, and will stay true to their identity 90 % of the time(they want it 100% of the time). Playing defense is much more demanding than playing offense. Most of your good defenses practice and take pride in flocking to the ball. They work on pursuit drills and make sure everyone gets flowing to the ball. The tough part about this is the fact that every player on the D doesn't take plays off, they are balls out all the time. For this reason Defenses have subbing systems where they will sub 1 backer on the 3rd series and another while always leaving in at least two starting backers. Most of the time they will do this with all of their areas(DL, DB, and LB's). This is a very smart way to do it but sometimes when you have 2's in you end up with matchup problems and sometimes give up big plays(b/c of considerable dropoff from your 1' to 2's). But you would be very hard pressed to find a lot of players that can play every defensive snap of a game with a high level of intensity. The more tired a player gets the more plays the player may take off. It may not sound like much but imagine that you leave an LB in a couple plays longer than he needs to go. Say the LB goes about 1/2 speed for a play (compensating for being tired) and arrives a little later than he would normally and the RB breaks a tackle and he misses his chance because he wasn't going all out- you end up giving up a td because the player didn't get to rest. Which usually will happen right after a turnover. Turnovers hurt the D in more ways than one. Imagine your D coming off the field after a long drive before holding the offense to a fg, they bent but didn't break. Then your O comes out runs a few plays or less and turns the ball over. The D is ushered back out on the field and are supposed to stop an offense that just put up some points and are ready to go again. Now your D has had a few plays to rest but after being on the field for a quite a while they need the O to have a good drive to provide a little break to gather themselves and go over adjustments that the D coordinator will have, which they always have to make when the D comes off the field. So the D's time to rest and the D's time to get valuable input from the Defensive staff is cut short because of turnovers. Each turnover that happens puts your D in a deeper and deeper hole to work out of. You can tell how much depth a team has on D when the first half the score is kind of low and the team may explode in the second half. Now you can credit some of that scoring output on Offensive guru's making their adjustments, but you can also look at a D getting tired. When a D gets tired and starts subbing you may see some more points put on the board with the some of 2's in. D's have to plan ahead to keep their D's as fresh as possible going into that fourth quarter. Game's are won in the fourth quarter every week. If you can make it to the fourth with your 1's in good shape with some gas left in the tank you have done your job as a D coordinator. Not every time but most of the time if two good teams are playing the team that loses defense will be on the field more than that of the winning team.(There are exceptions to every rule) How many of you have watched those games that kind of get out of hand and the offenses of either team just can't be stopped and the score ends up being ridiculous. Everyone tends to look at the offense and say man their good. Think about the defense chasing an offense all over the field, this is very tiring. Then they come off the field and are taking a breather and their O scores quickly. So they strap them on and go again and give up some more points. I've seen games that go back and forth and neither D is worth shooting and everybody looks at how great the O is. What about the D being so tired that couldn't stop the Manchester little league team. The D is backbone of the team and it starts with them, if they're not successful your team usually isn't. You can tell it's a bye week but I just wanted to put this out there. Sorry to bore you guys but we don't have a game for a little over a week. Offense wins games, but Defense wins championships.
) too used to seeing ND opponents fall forward on every play. This D is slamming them back.