Film Review: Wisconsin's young cornerbacks make young cornerback mistakes

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If you followed along Saturday, you know I had some issues with the way Wisconsin's cornerbacks were playing. Much of it is being young, but there are things that you need to learn or else you'll eventually die by fire, which was the case Saturday. It's not they aren't good enough athletes; it's that their technique is still raw and they aren't doing the little things to help themselves out. Let's take a look.

The short stuff

Wisconsin played a lot of Over 4 and mixed in some Cover 3 against Ohio State. That's fine. Cover 4 is a great defense against the spread that allows the safeties to get involved in run support. Seriously, it's not a passive defense, but the Badgers didn't necessarily run it like some other teams do.

That's fine, too. There's more than one way to skin a cat, as they say. But it does tend to put a tall task on your outside linebackers, who have to defend against the run and also cover the entire hook/curl/flat zone immediately at the snap of the ball. So passes like this are going to happen:





And things like this, where OSU is directly forcing the outside linebacker to decide between run and bubble because the quarterback is optioning off of him are going to happen until you start moving that cornerback up.:





But like I said, it's fine. If you want to force a team to dink and dunk 5-yard routes to the sideline all the way down the field, most likely at some point they are going to screw up or you're going to jump a route and they'll get behind the chains and have to do something they aren't comfortable with.
The problem is, when you are conceding the short, outside zone, you better cover...

The deep pass

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To continue reading about how Wisconsin's cornerbacks struggled defending the deep pass, follow the link the Bucky's 5th Quarter

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