Why has our defense been bad since 2008?

[4shotB]

Different eras of football is the TLDR.

The spread offense really started taking off around 08-09 in general. Also some rule changes with regards to what was holding, contact with receivers down field, what was pass interference and so on change the defensive game at the same time offenses were starting to focus more and more on spreading the field and isolating matchups.

Thoughtful post. My takeaway from all that is that the root cause is our process for hiring people is broken (maybe it's related to budgetary constraints). So I have no problem making staffing changes. But the process needs to be revamped somehow. Otherwise (imo) it appears to be a random roll of the dice designed to appease the angry masses by creating the illusion of change. Tech's defense as you point out doesn't need any more change for change's sake. We are near the end of our rope by continuing to make bad decisions upon bad decisions.

 

[jgtengineer]

Thoughtful post. My takeaway from all that is that the root cause is our process for hiring people is broken (maybe it's related to budgetary constraints). So I have no problem making staffing changes. But the process needs to be revamped somehow. Otherwise (imo) it appears to be a random roll of the dice designed to appease the angry masses by creating the illusion of change. Tech's defense as you point out doesn't need any more change for change's sake. We are near the end of our rope by continuing to make bad decisions upon bad decisions.

basically this. Fielding a defense is truly one of the harder thing sin college football. You can't really compare defensive stats because of differing competition levels but there is a reason why outside of really the big 10 and SEC defense is often considered an afterthought. Most schools have taken to simply scorign lots of points and hopign to win high scoring games. And doign so by some sort of offensive scheme that allows this. Under johnson our best defense was holdign onto the ball... under gailey our best defense was truthfully holding onto the ball. Tenuta's defenses were great at getting us the ball back through boom or bust blitzing but in the end it was a dominate pro style run game that let us win games with TOP and we lost the games where that didnt' work.

 

[Vespidae]

Different eras of football is the TLDR.

The spread offense really started taking off around 08-09 in general. Also some rule changes with regards to what was holding, contact with receivers down field, what was pass interference and so on change the defensive game at the same time offenses were starting to focus more and more on spreading the field and isolating matchups. The type of LB that can play in a 3-4 or traditional 4-3 and also deal with the speed of modern spread offenses is exceedingly rare. The ACC from 2002-2007 was primarily a power run conference. Most of our opponents were lining up in I or traditional 11 gun sets running variances on pro style offenses all attempting to match the Cowboys (chan gailey) of the 90s. We ran a defense designed specifically to stop these kinds of offenses with great talent coming to play in those defenses.

Right around the time CPJ gets here the entire world is changing. Recruiting services are starting to allow for easier isolation of talent from wherever it comes from on offense. We start tryign to build defenses that can handle the more modern spread offenses. We dont' get ellis Johnson instead hirign someone off his staff in wommack. Wommack is very hit or miss with us. Paul gets rid of him to get a guy who should in all honesty have been a slam dunk in groh. Groh was extremely defensively intelligent was a decent recruiter of an area of the country we normally didn't recruit but might be able to (landed us sneezy) and was running a defense Paul was fond of whcih was an odd fronted defense. But turns out due to the trend of tempo offenses and grohs inability to get plays in quickly eventually that doesn't work our defense isn't getting better. And groh gets let go. Then instead of hiring kelly Who seemed to fix that problem the rest of the year while being a bit more mulitple in even fronts. The money men wanted Ted Roof, who had just been hired up at penn state for a year to come back home and coach us because everyone remembers the black watch right? Forgetting that durign the 1980s most teams saw the forward pass as the thing you did on 3rd down when you couldn't run on first and second and against every down or nearly every down passing teams 3 deep shell in 4-3 doesn't work, you will give up yardage, bend don't break breaks often against high pass volume if you can't recruit the edge guys to make that work. And despite most of our 4 stars coming on defense we just never got the horses.
Once roof is gone we hire woody, again back to a 3-4 base only this is a one gap scheme compared to groh's 2 gap. Woody doesn't really have time to use scheme to our advantage but i have hard time thinking he couldn't have got some decent results out of our guys given what he's done at army by playing complimentary defense to the offense.

Now we don't really seem to be able to cover at all. Our scheme is just not very good either at utilizing talent which last i checked is mostly 4 star at this point. Or at getting people in the right position. The 4-2-5 3-3-5 are both attacking defenses you live and die by pressure. And we are rushing 3 and trying to cover and its not working.

Probably one of the more thoughtful posts on the subject. The different eras comment is key.

CPJ once described his philosophy and broke the game down into possessions, plays, and points. Asked about defense, he quipped that statistically, if the offense owned TOP and scored 28 points, Tech wins. It really didn't matter what the defense did ... he was confident that he could deliver the O.

Look at today. Alabama pundits are talking about how Bama's defense today is nowhere near as good as it was 5-6 years ago. Saban has gone very much up tempo with an emphasis on scoring (see rule changes, above). These days, you need a good, but not great defense ... really emphasizing defense as the SEC did is a bit like building the Maginot Line. It's yesterday's war.

Still, I would settle for a decent defense.

 

[Jmonty71]

We have a LONG trend going- 13 season worth of some truly terrible defenses (and 2008 wasn’t great either). we’ve had quite a few DC’s, some of whom definitely knew what they were doing (Groh) and others who went on to succeed after being fired from Tech (Wommack). What is the root cause of all these years of failure? I seem to recall that during Chan’s tenure he put emphasis on defense and put his most talented athletes there, do we still do that? I don’t think we've had great linebacking since the Tenuta days, our guys for 13 years have taken bad angles, failed to wrap-up, get lost in coverage and in general have not been good at stopping anything run or pass. We have no pass rush no matter how many guys we send and we always make the opposing QB look like John Elway crossbred with Mike Vick. CGC has proven success at multiple stops as a DC, it’s hard for me to understand how he can have a defense this Godawful without trying to be bad. So were young at DT and DE, thats one excuse, why can’t the db’s cover anyone? Why don’t we ever get a freaking fumble or INT? When was the last one- UNC? I hate watching my team play bad defense.

That is a very good question and one that GT needs to answer.... I think one issue is running defenses, in which we don't have the personnel for. While I do admit the 3-4 gives a lot of creativity to a good DC, it requires a few key pieces to work. One, you need a big hog mollie of a DT or NG that can play the 2 gaps. Two, you need to some fast OLBs, that can bring it, on blitzes and can also cover the slot WRs. I cannot say we honestly have those. A 4-3 requires at least what I call "good" DTs.... and a MLB that can lower the boom. I think we would be better equipped for a 4-3 than a 3-4... Just my opinion.

 

[Yaller Jacket]

Wherever this thread leads, I'm glad to see it. Despite the current gloom and doom, I can see big things happening offensively in years ahead. Not so on defense. We really don't do anything well on defense, at least consistently. As to the comment above on turnovers, it is absolutely amazing in a bad way. Even the blind pig should get more turnovers than we do.

 

[Northeast Stinger]

Ugh...I've had this conversation with friends.

EVERY.SINGLE.YEAR. since 2008 I go into the season thinking we could possibly be blessed with one thing: to finally have a better than average defense.

I don't think we've achieved that once. We have had some opportunistic defenses, though. In 2014, we coupled an opportunistic defense with an extremely efficient offense........and..........fire works, mostly!


Someone said we weren't that great in 2008. I feel like we pretty darn solid, defensively, in 2008.

2014 may have been my favorite defense ever at Tech. They won “the intangibles” and they saved several games for us while being a national leader in turnovers.

When Bud Carson (inventor of cover 2 defense and later architect of Pittsburgh Steel Curtain) was DC under Dodd he begged to put the best athletes on defense. He wanted Lenny Snow to play linebacker but Dodd said no.

Dodd himself was clear that he could scheme his way around recruiting deficits on offense but on defense you have to out recruit other teams to win.

 

[MountainBuzzMan]

Overall, Offense, Defense

2021 81, 75, 83
2020 101, 92, 88
2019 100, 94, 93
2018 56, 19 , 102
2017 39, 23 , 47
2016 37, 29 , 66
2015 56, 78 , 42
2014 11, 2, 58

What is interesting here is 2014, 15, 16 and 17 was kind of average not so bad as the OP alludes too. Probably tracks the talent level on the team. Unlike now where the coaches suck so bad they cant even coach to the talent level on the team.

Lets put it this way, you put a defense on the field from those 4 years of CPJ and we probably go to a bowl game this year and the fire CGC thread would have died a natural death or even never been started. That list reinforces how bad of a coach CGC is. Absolutely disgusting what he is doing to the program

 

[UgaBlows]

Could it be that our current group of upper-class defensive players are just ruined from playing under 3 DC’s? Too many bad habits ingrained into their muscle memory, too much to think about etc? Our best days from our DT’s and DE’s are definitely in the future as Our talented players are very young there and we have 4 star DT’s coming from this recruiting haul but are prob 2 years away from being major factors. I feel like a lot of our DB transfers, while highly rated are not really working out so-far. And when’s the last time we had an NFL quality linebacker? Quez, Eley, and CT are all quality players but we Just don’t have a guy with next level speed, size and instincts that destroys the other team’s hopes and dreams on offense.

 

[jgtengineer]

Could it be that our current group of upper-class defensive players are just ruined from playing under 3 DC’s? Too many bad habits ingrained into their muscle memory, too much to think about etc? Our best days from our DT’s and DE’s are definitely in the future as Our talented players are very young there and we have 4 star DT’s coming from this recruiting haul but are prob 2 years away from being major factors. I feel like a lot of our DB transfers, while highly rated are not really working out so-far. And when’s the last time we had an NFL quality linebacker? Quez, Eley, and CT are all quality players but we Just don’t have a guy with next level speed, size and instincts that destroys the other team’s hopes and dreams on offense.

Its possible, but in truth all our upperclassman that played as freshmen did very well under roof and were not that bad under woody (our issue in 2018 was with pressures surprise surprise) and hell first year of collins our secondary was doing pretty decent and it was a line problem. They have gotten slower and with bad eyes over their time with collin's crew.

 

[Animal02]

Its possible, but in truth all our upperclassman that played as freshmen did very well under roof and were not that bad under woody (our issue in 2018 was with pressures surprise surprise) and hell first year of collins our secondary was doing pretty decent and it was a line problem. They have gotten slower and with bad eyes over their time with collin's crew.

But all the dance moves on the sidelines have improved significantly.

 

[UgaBlows]

Its possible, but in truth all our upperclassman that played as freshmen did very well under roof and were not that bad under woody (our issue in 2018 was with pressures surprise surprise) and hell first year of collins our secondary was doing pretty decent and it was a line problem. They have gotten slower and with bad eyes over their time with collin's crew.

I don’t recall anything good about our def in 2018, ranked 102

 

[jgtengineer]

I don’t recall anything good about our def in 2018, ranked 102

Safety was about the only thing good on that defense.

 

[takethepoints]

I'll add one thing about Tenuta. I think one reason he was so successful was Chan Gailey. A lot of Tech people disliked the way we played under Chan because he was so conservative on O. But the main reason for that was to reduce the number of mistakes that could result in poor field position for the D. This meant two things. First, the D did get good field position most of the time and the number of iINT and fumbles was minimized. Second, since the D knew that the game was on their shoulders, they played like it. I think this is no longer as easy for reasons that were outlined so well above by the Engineer. But it was when Tenuta was DC.

Too bad, that. One of my fondest memories in Tech football was beating Fridge's first Maryland team 7 - 3. That game epitomized a mantra of mine: get ahead, play good D, then sit on the ball like a slug. We did that for the entire game. I loved it.

 

[Treb1982]

Cause our defensive coordinator coach sucks!!! Next question

 

[4shotB]

Cause our defensive coordinator coach sucks!!! Next question

The next question is....because there has been several of them picked by 2 different HC'ssince 2008, is our string of bad defenses purely coincidental or bad luck in your opinion?

 

[UgaBlows]

It’s interesting that in ‘15 and ‘17 Roof had us in the 40’s on defense, Tenuta’s last season was 45th for perspective...

It seems like Tenuta has mostly struggled everywhere else he has landed since his days here, his style of D doesn’t really seem to work against the spread-shotgun i guess

 

[UgaBlows]

Did Roof get fired because of the Miami game in ‘17?

 

[Northeast Stinger]

It’s interesting that in ‘15 and ‘17 Roof had us in the 40’s on defense, Tenuta’s last season was 45th.

It seems like Tenuta has mostly struggled everywhere else he has landed since his days here, his style of D doesn’t really seem to work against the spread-shotgun i guess

I was not a huge fan of Tenuta. I know others were. It seemed like he only had one playbook -all or nothing, throw the other team for a loss or give up an explosive play for a touchdown.

I liked his blitz packages but there were some games where I wished he could have switched to a bend not break defense for a while to make the other team burn clock on long drives. We lost some games I felt like because we gave up quick scores to teams after we had the lead.

Just my opinion.

 

[iceeater1969]

Who was the defensive coordinator from 2002-2007? Oh yeah…

The best sustained defense over that S&P chart period.

Good coaches are hard to come by… they make mediocre players good and they win games. You don’t need hype videos to win games. Tenuta was the opposite and here we are longing for those days.

Imagine if Paul had kept him on.

The guiding principal of Coach's team was zero unforced errors so we win at end if u make one error. Imo, Tenuta defense was so different and Coach's offense was so different Teams would not have time to prepare for them both- while one could be stopped the other would dominate.

I wonder if T left or was moved out because he wanted more say in how gt practiced.

Imo, with our new offense that s like every other team, a Tenuta defense could be "our scheme to overcome lack of mega money.



Baring that we clearly don't have defensive coaches that can coach up and scheme against the "way better teams" .
Lets get some money and buy really good defensive coaches.

Or we can just do the gt whine plus nothing but blame the few donors we have.
Yea lets do that and sit at beach house or go on cruises.

 

[Northeast Stinger]

I was one of those who was excited about coach Woody. Felt like he was starting to get the D playing faster and missing fewer assignments. But he needed 3 years, imo, to turn things around.