Breakdown Sports

Michigan's offense is going to pull a lot of OL. Similarly, Michigan's defense is going to see more teams increasingly go to pulling OL as more teams shift back to man/gap schemes and away from the zone oriented teams. Of those plays, Power O is probably the most relied upon for opponents. In this article, we are going to look at how Michigan defends the Power O and why they defend it this way. In my next post, I'll discuss how an offense can react to it. Previously, I've discussed how MSU defends Power .

Michigan’s base run play is Power O . Over the past half decade, MSU has specialized in shutting down pro-style rushing attacks, and with that comes shutting down the Power O run play. It got to the point that Stanford, during the 2014 Rose Bowl, rarely even tried to execute their most standard play. In this post, we want to investigate what makes so effective against the Power O run.

Minnesota’s run defense played pretty well against Northwestern. Mostly utilizing Cover 4 , they were able to maintain numbers advantage inside the box for most of the game. When they did get gashed though, it was mostly because the backside was slow in pursuit. In Cover 4, the LBs, particularly the backside LB, must flow fast. If he reads the play immediately, he can tend to read “cloudy/clear” and shoot off the butt of a pulling OL or beat a zone blocking OL across his face and blow up the play in the backfield. If he can’t do that, he must scrape over the top quickly to get to the playside.

Defensive line is a complicated beast. From a high level view, it looks simply like a bunch of very large men mashing into each other, one group trying to encapsulate a player with a ball, the other trying to open a gap in that other team from which the player with the ball can escape. But as is the case with football, the truth is much more filled with detail and minutia. In this article we’re going to focus specifically on one aspect, that being, how to take on trap and kick blocks with two basic techniques: Wrong Arm technique and Squeeze technique. Squeeze Technique

ED - Sorry this is late this week. Had some trouble actually getting around to the game. Introduction Michigan's defense, for the second straight game, struggled to apply pressure on the QB. Seth over at MGoBlog took a look briefly at the front four , so I won't discuss that much here, but there are other reasons that the defensive line failed to generate many statistics. As I've stated several times now, the defense needs to work as a unit in order to be successful. Every person must succeed at their assignment, and if they don't then there will be breakdowns. Then the pressure from the DL won't get home before the QB can get the pass off. The back seven in pass coverage is just as responsible for generating pressure as the front four. In this piece, we are going to look at how Michigan struggled in the secondary against Akron, and what must be done to fix it. LB Drops Here, Michigan is in a Tampa 2 defense, where the MIKE will drop into the bubble betw...