I'd love to see us implement a 3-3-5 element to this Defense in certain packages.
San Diego St mastered the 3-3-5 & had one of the best Defenses in the country under Zach Barnett who's a Danny Gonzalez/Rocky Long disciple.
When healthy, we have quite a few players that gives us flexibility to infuse scheme diversity & throw different looks out there to create confusion & pressure on offenses.
Due to our DL depth we can mix & match the looks of the front line & put a group of athletes in the Secondary that can all play multiple spots.
For instance:
You can go with 3 down linemen of Rousseau, Miller & Phillips, then have Huff, Brooks & Frierson at LB & the 5 DB's would be Blades/Couch at CB, Hall/Bolden at Safety & the Nickel S would be Keontra Smith.
With Hall playing Deep centerfield, he'll roam & patrol the backfield, Huff will come on a delayed stunt Blitz, while Brooks & Frierson cover the middle of the field & the flats, with Bolden & Smith in quarters coverage, Blades & Couch press man on the outside.
There's probably about a dozen or so combos I could think of in multiple set schemes for our Defense, but the key is to play to our strengths & minimize mistakes being exposed by keeping everything in front of us & allowing the Safety depth to cut down on the Deep ball attacks.
How we stop the short underneath quick passing attack is let all these versatile athletes we have that can be LB/S's just cover the flats & the quick slant routes. If we stop committing our LB's to Blitzing every down we'll have more defenders to put a stop to the death by a thousand paper cuts style offenses we'll face a lot this year.
What we don't want is too many one on ones in the secondary, as long as we have all these Safeties we should be running a majority of our snaps in Nickel & double everything up on the outside.
front