Breakdown Sports

 I've put together some tweets, but didn't get as in-depth as I originally wanted to. That said, I believe I have enough for at least an initial primer of the Jim Knowles defense. Jim Knowles has a pretty diverse background, starting as a primarily 4-3 coach, growing into a 4-2-5 coach at Duke, and finally transitioning to the 3-high safety coach at Oklahoma State which he is known for today. Still, he didn't lose all the tricks in the bag that he developed over the years, so let's take a look. Ohiostatebuckeyes.com

With an incredible defense, Mark Dantonio ushered in one of the most successful coaching tenures in Michigan State football history. While the highs of his tenure will almost certainly be remembered by those quarters-heavy, no-fly zone defenses, his downfall will at least be partially linked to the ineptness of the offense overall. While I don’t believe scheme was the primary issue for the 2019 Michigan State offense, fans will be interested in understanding what Mel Tucker brings in with his new staff. Due to the timing of the coaching change, Tucker heavy relied on bringing his old staff from Colorado with him to East Lansing. With Tucker comes his former Colorado offensive coordinator Jay Johnson. I’ve taken the task of watching the 2019 Buffaloes in an effort to highlight what to expect from the Spartans offense in Tucker’s first year. MSU Athletics

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...

Mike Riley was introduced as Nebraska's new coach in early December and I've been trying to get around to put up a primer for a while now. This is a guy that has really been just about at every level of football, as long as it was on the west coast. He's coached in the NAIA, CFL, Division IAA (FCS), WLAF (that's the World League of American Football), Division I, and the NFL (he also played DB under Bear Bryant). He's also been in charge of both offense and defense at a high level, serving as the USC offensive coordinator and QB coach in the mid-90s, and as the New Orleans Saints DBs coach in 2002 (at the position where he rose in the ranks initially). The guy understands both sides of the football, and being an NFL head coach little more than a decade ago, combined with over a decade at Oregon St, he understands the wide array of schemes and concepts that can be used. That's a powerful coaching tool, even for a guy already 61 years old.

Tim Beck - Used to wearing red I'm quite familiar with Beck so I can push this out rather quickly.  This is an Interesting hire, but I like It. In general, I liked Beck's scheme at Nebraska. It's more of a stretch zone base, rather than OSU's tight zone, but it typically utilizes more zone based tag schemes than Meyer has in the past (read: more blocking adjustments within zone scheme, or a lot more of this ). It'll be interesting if some of that gets implemented into Meyer's offense, which I'm fairly certain will  still be the base O as it has always been under Meyer (though he has often allowed his OCs to add wrinkles). Warriner will almost certainly be in charge of play calling now, as he's more directly familiar with Meyer's scheme and a promotion is in order to keep him around. Meyer has tended to prefer to promote from within as well. Hit the jump for more on coaching ability, fit at OSU, and offensive wrinkles he may add.