I’m not IBeeBallin. I think you’re only going to get a solid answer on whether it’s Thacker’s defense or Collins’ by being one of the people at practice and on the sidelines.
Collins ran a 4-3 at Miss State back in 2014. A lot of teams have dropped that in favor of a 4-2-5 with all the spread/“RPO” offenses.
Thacker had one season as DC at Temple. Taver Johnson was the DC the year before (he’s coaching for the Las Vegas Raiders now, but with Gruden fired, who knows what happens next).
I see some coaches that are 3-4 coaches, and that formation is their philosophy. Same with 4-3 or 4-2-5 ,etc. There are some “positionless” coaches out there, like Jay Bateman at UNC. UNC has two Defensive Coordinators, and they took Bateman from Army after they had a fantastic defense—top 25, I think—and he was replaced with Nate Woody.
With Thacker, I’m not sure what’s going on, but even though he can go deep talking about defense, so far he’s not a Dean Pees or Monte Kiffin level mad scientist on defense.
I’m more of a “your formation isn’t your defense, it’s a tactic you run to counter an offense” kind of person, but I grew up when you’d swap from a 52 to a 4-3 to a nickel to a dime based on the offense, and high-speed offenses don’t let you do that. Thacker talks like a 4-2-5 or a 3-3-5 is your defense, but he doesn’t sound like a true believer in a particular defensive scheme.
There are other things more important than your alignment—mainly knowing and executing on your assignments.
Failed tackles led to 10-12-15 yard plays. 52 vs 4-3 vs 3-4 vs whatever doesn’t matter if you’re going to do that. We had tackles for loss that went for first downs. That’s not even an “assignment” thing. You can’t have that as a problem to solve more than halfway through the season. For me, that’s the biggest issue we have on defense, and nothing else is close.
On top of that, we have bad mistakes going on in the back end. Against UVA, we had a ton of lost 1:1 battles, but yesterday we had players getting behind a corner and running free, repeatedly. That’s happened a lot this year. I see receivers open in a second or two after the snap.
On one hand, I can look at players like Biggers and see the argument that we’re getting close. On the other hand, the lack of fundamentals in things like tackling and the wrong kind of chaos on defense has us going in the wrong direction. I do feel like other coaches could come in here and take the players we have and make them into a top 50 defense—and that’s not even asking much.