I believe there are some things being unmentioned in this conversation, that when combined together, will result in a better defense. Stats are misleading. In 2018 we may have had our best defense under Diaz, yet an extremely bad offense left them in bad positions consistently and they were out on the field too much. Our offense should be very good this year. Out of King's own mouth "this is the first time I am playing a second year in the same offense."
1) Baker called zone defense roughly 15% more snaps than Diaz did. That is a huge swing if you consider that Diaz was close to 50/50 zone vs man. That would be 65% zone and 35% man. Macho brings up a good point that Diaz is a fire zone DC. That is the truth, however, when you have an excessively unaggressive DC (Baker) calling plays for what is supposed to be an aggressive defense (it was significantly more aggressive with Diaz calling plays) then you have a guy that is a fish out of water, which Baker was here. Zone/Man must be mixed up at a better rate. It is a requirement to use both in college football now-a-days.
2) TRob is here and so is Stevensen. Diaz will call more man than Baker did, plus we have a drastically better man defensive back coach. Safeties will likely play better as well. On top of it Baker and Banda were never on the same page. Baker often called one play for the defense, then Banda called another play for the DB's.
3) Simpson brings gap integrity and outside contain. He was a big part of why our defense was better in 2018. Diaz does not preach gap integrity, but Simpson does. That results in a better run defense and makes the LB's job easier because they know exactly what gap they are responsible for. Our run defense was porous last year to say the least and that has everything to do with playing undisciplined football with no gap integrity or contain. We talk about how hard it is to replace our 2 DE's. It is hard, not going to lie, but they were a part of the problem getting too far up the field or crashing, which left wide open running lanes. Watch 2018 games and see how much more discipled our DL was that year.
4) Patke - laugh it up if you will, bash him, whatever. Finley was totally lost and confused playing under Banda at Safety. They moved him to Striker under Patke and he played really good football. Good enough that all of us fans were concerned about who would replace him. Along comes Frierson and K. Smith and they were perhaps the most consistent unit on a bad defense last year. Patke will be an upgrade over Baker for a conglomerate of reasons. Once again, Baker was a fish out of water here. Patke did play LB in HS as well, plus K.Smith played so well as a back up Striker they are trying to get him on the field more consistently at WLB.
5) Shoop is the gameplanner and gameplanning has been a huge problem here. Shoop had an aggressive defense at MSU. Similar to Diaz's D. In 2018 Shoop had the #1 scoring defense in college football the very same year that Diaz had a top 5 scoring defense. Shoop held Bama to a 24-0 loss in 2018 without having any resemblance of an offense to help him out that game. Shoop had a better defense than Diaz did in the SEC West with a less talented team. You can bet that Diaz is going to be wide open to Shop's input and there is very likely to to be less soft zone or fire zone in our defense. Significantly more man.
I am not saying that our defense is suddenly going to go back to 2018 form. What I am saying is there is a big conglomerate of reasons the defense will be better. As already mentioned, every defense gets lit up with some frequency in today's college football. The goal is to be consistently better. Opposing offenses not named Bama and Clemson will have a rough time outscoring our offense this year. A combination of a more consistent offense and a more consistent defense results in a points swing on the scoreboard, meaning more wins and not getting embarrassed as bad vs Bama/Clemson. I am hoping that holds true.
