Breakdown Sports

Going a bit more in depth with Don Brown's scheme

Don Brown - Michigan Defensive Coordinator It was said that Jim Harbaugh wanted to go more towards a 3-4 Defense, and what he got was a guy that runs a similar 4-3/3-4 look that his former defensive coordinator D.J. Durkin incorporated (update: he leaned more 3-4 early in his BC tenure, before making the transition to more 4-3 later; he ultimately became almost exclusively 4-3 early at Michigan before mixing it with a 3-3 style defense about 40% of snaps later in his tenure at UM). If that's what he wanted, he got his man. He also got a man that began his coaching in the Ivy league at Dartmouth and even was the head coach (posting a 26-10 record) as the Yale Baseball coach, where he was also the defensive coordinator. Yes, he sounds like a Jim Harbaugh guy. Since then, he's been the defensive coordinator at Brown, UMass, Maryland, UConn, and Boston College. He's also held head coaching positions at Plymouth State, Northeastern, and UMass. But that's enough o...

In this post I just want to diagram every sack up to the Illinois game (post-Illinois will be covered in Part II). Unfortunately, I don't have Western Illinois film, so two sacks will be missing, so you'll have to live with 11 diagrams. I'm going to keep the descriptions of how these work mostly non-existent for the sake of brevity, outside of a brief primer. I embed video where I can and link to a clip where I can't.

As teams begin to get faster, more spread out, and more pass heavy on offense, a way many defenses are counteracting this is by moving to a 3-4 defense. A 3-4 defense sacrifices some of the beef, at least in terms of numbers, at the LOS in favor of an extra LB (relative to a 4-3). However, not all 3-4 defenses are equal. From a high-level POV, there are two standard types of 3-4 defenses: One-Gap and Two-Gap. Both have different strengths and weaknesses and are generally played differently. In this article, we’re going to focus on the One-Gap 3-4 defense, it’s nomenclature, it’s strengths and weaknesses, the fundamentals of the front, and how it generally plays against a variety of offensive sets.

This year Wisconsin has switched to a 3-4 defense, and one of the benefits is the benefits it gives verse defenses that try to spread them out horizontally. This can mean how it adapts to spread concepts, but also, how it adapts to many 2-TE personnel groupings that try to gain an advantage by creating more gaps for the defense to fill. The 3-4 puts 5 people on the LOS, it provides outside leverage, it provides strength at the point of attack, and makes it relatively easy for the ILBs to scrape to the ball. Basically, if defenses read their keys, the 3-4 is the perfect defense to handle a 12 personnel offense. The 3-4 Against Iowa’s 2-TE Set First, here is how Iowa will want to block this: Wisconsin’s two DEs (DE and DT) are lined heads up on the OTs in a 4-tech. The ILBs are lined up in a 20 technique, which is heads up on the guards, about 3-4 yards off the LOS. The NT is lined above the center, and both OLBs are lined up in a 9-technique with their inside shoulder j...