IDP 101 -- Discussing Defensive Schemes, Defensive Line Techniques Options

[Jene Bramel]

IDP 101 – Storytime With Warren Sapp

Understanding defensive football is a passion of mine, so I’ll try not to get to long-winded and here. And I’m no Ron Jaworski, just a self-taught football fan. But hopefully, some of you will find my ramblings interesting and useful.

I’m going to try to cover all sorts of ground with this series. I’ll try to strike a balance between technical playbook concepts and the art of team defensive football. We’ll do plenty of player-specific details, but look to bring everything back to a big picture approach. We could probably start just about anywhere, but I’m going to start with a look at the career of Warren Sapp.

Apologies to Raider fans who know what’s coming.

Everyone knows Warren Sapp. Seven time Pro Bowl defensive tackle, Defensive Player of the Year in 2000 after a 16.5 sack season, key anchor of the perennial top ten Tampa Bay Buccaneer defense of the 1990s and one of the league’s loudest trash talkers. That Warren Sapp. Now quick, name me five other defensive tackles in the league today. Unless you’re much more than a casual football fan, you probably hesitated somewhere along the way.

Just how good was Sapp in Tampa Bay? This good:

Warren Sapp 1995-2003 >> 49 solo tackles, 8.5 sacks (as an interior lineman) per 16 games

Arguably still within the prime of his career in 2004, Sapp signed with the Oakland Raiders and was moved to defensive end in new defensive coordinator Rob Ryan’s multiple front, but mostly 3-4, scheme. Sapp struggled to have any impact, finishing with just 2.5 sacks in 2004, two of which came late in the season after the Raiders went back to a mostly four man front with Sapp back at defensive tackle. Before you argue that Sapp was just a washed up old man by that point at age 31, consider that Sapp would later have yet another double digit sack season in 2006.

Sapp would later call 2004 “the hardest year of my life.”

So, what’s the big deal. Everybody has bad years. What made Sapp so successful in Tampa but hate life in Oakland?

We can get our answer from none other than the colossally disappointing David Carr. After a rare play in 2004 in which Sapp got near enough to the pocket to chat up the opposing quarterback, Carr looked at him and said, “You need to be in a 3-technique.” Okay, so maybe that’s not the punchline that brings down the house. But come back and read that line again later this week after you finish the string of posts to follow.

Why exactly did Sapp’s stats drop so harshly? What is a 3-technique anyway? Wouldn’t you like to be as insightful as David Carr?

Well, that’s the thrust of this series. It’s one thing to nod your head when a commentator says that Warren Sapp was a poor fit in the 3-4. It’s another thing to have an intelligent discussion about why. None of us are likely to ever be capable of designing and coordinating an NFL defense. But it’s fun to learn a little bit of what those guys know.

This week, we’re going to look into why certain defensive tackles are more likely to end up on SportsCenter than others, how some defensive ends are given a pass rushing edge by their coordinators and why Bruce Smith was perhaps the rarest of all defensive ends.

Before we can do that, however, we need to build a quick foundation of defensive line terminology.

Next up: Defensive Line "Alignments" and "Techniques" (aka Making Things More Difficult Than They Probably Need To Be)

[Jene Bramel]

IDP 101 – How to Make a Defensive Tackle a Star (and a huge amount of )

There are a number of ways to slide your defensive tackles to allow them to be more aggressive. One of those ways has been made popular by Tony Dungy and Monte Kiffin over the past two decades because of the success of their Tampa-2 defensive scheme.

It’s called the “under” front, because the strength of the defensive line is shifted away from the strong side (TE side) of the offensive formation. Teams that use it will often refer to their defensive tackles as a nose tackle and an undertackle. The undertackle is in a 3 alignment on the weak side, and you’ll hear the terms “undertackle” and “3-technique tackle” used interchangeably.

For those of you who like diagrams, here’s what it looks like.

CODE

“Under” Front                  


                  TE      T       G       C       G       T
                        DE              NT         UT       DE

The under front has been a mainstay of Cover-2 teams for decades. If you’re going to keep your back seven in coverage, you have to get pressure up front. It helps to have stud pass rushing ends, but undershifting your line allows you to get your hand-picked, quick, powerful defensive tackle isolated on a guard. Essentially, you’ve schemed yourself a third defensive end. And, in fact, many of the players who have been successful as undertackles played defensive end at some point during their careers.

Warren Sapp is generally considered the prototype undertackle today. But there were a number of impressive names before him. Bud Carson, whose Steel Curtain defense was based on the Cover-2 and a major influence on Dungy, continually schemed ways to get Mean Joe Greene isolated on a guard. Floyd Peters, under whom Kiffin worked in Minnesota before Dungy, made Keith Millard one of the first true undertackles. Millard went on to set the record for single season sacks by an interior lineman – 18 in 1989 – a record that still stands today.

After Millard in Minnesota came John Randle, the undertackle in the first version of the Dungy/Kiffin Tampa-2 defense. Randle had eight consecutive double digit sack seasons as a defensive tackle, not including his 9.5 sack output in his first season as an undertackle under Dungy and Kiffin.

La’Roi Glover and his 17 sacks in 2000? Undertackle. Rod Coleman, Kevin Williams and Vonnie Holliday have racked up numbers in recent seasons as undertackles. Tommie Harris has already made two Pro Bowls as Lovie Smith’s undertackle. And Cory Redding just took the Detroit Lions for a seven year, $49 million dollar deal after moving to undertackle and putting up seven sacks during the second half of his contract year.

IDP newbies need no longer wonder why we continually pimp undertackles as viable roster options. Seek out the teams with a seemingly undersized, quick DT that use a lot of underfronts and you have a potential goldmine. Keep an eye on what the Rams decide to do with Adam Carriker this offseason. He’s a Keith Millard waiting to happen.

What of Warren Sapp? Much smarter men than I have noted that you fit your scheme to your talent rather than trying to force a known talent into an unfavorable scheme. In the next post, we’ll see why a simple change in scheme can so significantly affect a seven time Pro Bowler. We’ll learn why David Carr may have made a better defensive coordinator than quarterback. And we’ll talk about why you should be more impressed with Bruce Smith’s 200 career sacks than you already were.

Next up: Why Warren Sapp "Hated Life" in the 3-4 Defensive Front

[dgreen]

continually schemed ways to get Mean Joe Greene isolated on a guard.

Not sure if you want to get too much into how offenses counter these alignments/techniques, but I had a possible stupid question. Your statement that I quoted makes it sound like they'd scheme one way to isolate him, then the O would counter with something, and the D would then have to scheme another way to isolate him, and back and forth each side counters. But, from your drawing, it seems like you simply line him up in the 3 technique and there's no need to "continually scheme ways."

So, what do offenses do to counter scheme? Are there offensive philosophies/sets that combat the 3 technique better than others or is it simply about the talent of the guard?