Breakdown Sports

Tite and Mint continue to be the defense du jour among Twitter followers, and as college teams start looking at what some of the best defenses did last year, I anticipate even more will start to implement the front into their package in some form or another. As it becomes more prominent, offenses are going to need to start adapting playcalls for the defense in order to maximize their output. But, of course, you don’t know necessarily a defense is going to run Tite on a given down or stay in that basic look post-snap, so you have to work within your system and not have plays that blowup if you see anything else. This post is going to look at ways of tagging specific base plays and adding wrinkles to better run your base scheme against 4i-0-4i looks. Previously we’ve looked at the Fundamentals of Tite and Mint , and also some Pre-snap Adjustments to thing about in terms of split, motion, and blocking rules .

Now that I’ve touched on how the Tite formation works , I want to take a look from the other side of the ball and how it can be attacked. While the focus of this post is primarily on the run game (because the backend coverage can be largely modified), it is important to keep in mind the common pass responsibilities, as we will draw from that conflict. Before getting into specific plays, I first want to look holistically at the formation and how to put an offense in position to exploit it. Then we can get a bit deeper into some actual play calling.

I'll get into more things later, but wanted to at least give a brief primer on Michigan's new Head Coach, Jim Harbaugh. Gregory Shamus, Getty Images Jim Harbaugh, throughout his coaching tenure, has ran a predominately West Coast Offense based offense. He prefers to be a bit more run heavy than many of the WCO predecessors, but he's willing to mix it up. He favors FBs and H-Backs and loves to utilize a variety of man blocking schemes with them to make it more difficult to key on players as a defense. Pulls, short traps, long traps, whams, leads, kicks, seals, he'll use whatever he can to give a different look to the defense. The Key Play