Players are evaluated on several things, knowledge and skill are two of the biggest. In theory a smart player, known as having a high FB IQ can be a poor performer in that they are slow or physically outmatched..........
Dont all coaches teach gap responsibility, lanes, coverage responsibility etc.... ? A 4-3 is a 4-3 under every coach isn’t it ?
In some systems, you will have different responsibilities, maybe even to the point of occupying multiple blockers instead of going into a gap. A 3-4 can vary wildly depending on the implementation and so can a 4-3. However, I don’t think that answers your question
I’ll put it up front so you can skip if you want—I’m not sure how long it’s been since we played fundamentally sound.
Not only have we not had much defensive continuity, but I think we’ve covered up our problems for so long we’ve just never fixed what we needed to.
Have players been going to the correct gaps and taking good angles, and otherwise playing good fundamental defense sometime in the recent past?
Nate Woody’s defense ranked behind Roof’s by most measures. Most of us were hoping for improvement in year 2 with Woody, but his first year was a regression. I don’t recall people calling out bad fundamentals at that time, but I don’t have any evidence of any improvement in any area during that time.
The Roof era was rife with complaints about both scheme and fundamentals (bad angles, bad tackling, wrong gap, etc.)
Charles Kelley was a short term interim under whom we seemed to moved up to at least middling play. We didn’t offer him the DC role, and he went to FSU. I heard fewer complaints during his tenure, but still plenty.
Groh, for a brief time, had good fundamentals and flashes of scheme doing good things. The flashes all disappeared and then things degraded.
Before that was Wommack. We saw occasional good play during that time, and he still had players schooled under Tenuta who played well. He wasn’t impressive and you still had people finding issues with basics.
To go much deeper I’d have to go into the film vault and review some things, but I feel fairly confident the last time we saw good fundamentals on defense might have been Kelley, but definitely was Tenuta (who would take some big risks that might seem too big to some).
Tenuta was the last DC where I heard a pro coach say his players could be drafted knowing how to play and having good technique
