John Shinn
BOULDER, Colo. — Alonzo Dotson has been getting lessons on playing defensive line his whole life. It’s part of his family’s culture. His grandfather, Alphonse, played in the NFL and his uncle, Santana, won a Super Bowl with Green Bay.
He’s been like a sponge, soaking up the football advice they’ve doled out over the years. But lately, that advice is getting less and less relevant.
“I have to tell them, ‘Teams don’t just run the ball anymore,’” Dotson said. “We’ve got these zone reads, a little bit of option, throw-back passes; all kinds of crazy stuff. Relating back to these old guys is kind of complicated.”
Dotson isn’t in the minority when it comes to the complexity of playing defense nowadays.
Each season, the game becomes more complex. The offensive innovations over the last decade left defenses struggling to keep pace.
Take a look at the Big 12 Conference. Teams are scoring points at a rapid rate. Nine Big 12 teams are averaging over 30 points a game and the same number are averaging over 400 yards of total offense a game.
Some of the credit goes to weak non-conference schedules.
But some of it also goes to the complex spread offenses run throughout the league. Each season there are more options to defend. It may have started when Mike Leach brought the four- and five-wide receiver sets to the conference when he was OU’s offensive coordinator in 1999. But the systems have mutated throughout the conference as each offensive coordinator has added his own wrinkles.
“Those guys are like mad scientists drawing up stuff on the blackboard,” Sooner defensive backs coach Bobby Jack Wright said.
Staying up is tough.
OU defensive coordinator Brent Venables recalls his last season at Kansas State in 1998 as a starting point. The Wildcats had one of the best defenses in college football that season. But they only ran two coverages.
“We ran man defense about 90 percent of the time and we saw four-wide (receiver) personnel maybe 5 percent of the time,” he said. “Our change up was cover three (zone defense); that was it.”
OU will probably run four times that many coverages just today.
“Times have changed to say the least,” Venables said.
They have had to.
The wide array of formations and different sets of personnel are designed to get receivers and running backs the ball in open space. But they’re also employed to drive defenses nuts. The more alignments, the harder it is to line up against.
“It’s a thinking man’s game and there’s so much more stuff than there was even five years ago,” Venables said.
That will be obvious at 12:30 p.m. today when the third-ranked Sooners (4-0) take on Colorado (2-2) at Folsom Field. Buffaloes coach Dan Hawkins is one of those “mad scientists” that drives defensive coordinators batty.
Remember the confusion and deception Boise State used to top the Sooners in last year’s Fiesta Bowl? It was Hawkins’ offensive system the Broncos employed.
How do you defend it all?
There are no easy answers.
But the starting point is well known.
“You have to have skills guys that are smart. That’s the perfect antidote,” Venables said.
Defense was once about raw emotion and beating the man in front of you and making a tackle. It still is, but it’s also about reading keys and reacting to what those keys are telling.
“Coaches around here do a good job of breaking it down and making it as simple as it can be,” Dotson said. “We focus on a couple of keys and don’t get caught up in all the mess going on the backfield. Just focus on a couple keys and that allows you to play faster.”
That will be the key for OU’s defense today and the rest of the season. Colorado is one of many offenses the Sooners will see that will be difficult to stop.
“It is still them trying to run the ball, trying to throw the ball and us doing what we are supposed to do to stop them,” cornerback Marcus Walker said. “When you get down to the end, you can’t invent anything new.”
But offensive coordinators will keep trying. And defenses will be trying to keep up.
John Shinn
366-3536
jshinn@normantranscript.com
