How can Texas adapt to defend SEC spread offenses?
Texas has a weak record when facing “Veer and Shoot” spread offenses three years into the Steve Sarkisian and Pete Kwiatkowski era. The SEC includes multiple teams who either directly run the offense (Oklahoma, Mississippi State, Tennessee) or run similar styles heavily influenced by it (Ole Miss, Auburn). The Longhorns are 2-2 against the style with one of those wins coming against Davis Beville and the crippled 2022 Sooners.
Here’s a quick summary of Texas’ experiences defending the offense under Sark and PK:
YearOpponentScoreOffensive stats2021Arkansas40-21 Arkansas471 total yards, 138 passing, 331 rushing2022Oklahoma49-0 Texas195 total yards, 39 passing, 156 rushing2023Oklahoma34-30 Oklahoma486 total yards, 285 passing, 201 rushing2023TCU29-26 Texas390 total yards, 302 passing, 88 rushing
In part I of this series, I broke down the challenges this offense presents with its wide spacing and run/pass conflicts and discussed why Texas has struggled to hold up against it.
Today we’re going to talk about potential tweaks and adjustments they could make to find answers in the future.
The psychology of Veer and Shoot offense
The aim of this style of offense is to simplify football down to a very fundamental level in order to play “basketball on grass” and boil things down to the most efficient plays. Veer and shoot coaches want simple decisions for their quarterback and loads of space for their best players so they can work in isolation 1-on-1, often against defenders of the coordinator’s choosing.
Stopping these offenses can be really simple but only if you think like they do. Your own defensive system and gameplan should be designed to counter that specific Veer and Shoot opponent. You can’t trot out a normal defense and expect to get positive results against a system designed to exploit normal defenses by breaking normal rules of engagement. If they’re going to shelve offensive options in order to line up in their bizarre formations, you need to ignore the offensive options they left on the shelf.
Any sort of “we’re going to make them play our style!” approach is doomed to failure unless it comes with drastic tweaks in alignment or structure to flip the game back to terms that benefit the defense. It’s been remarkable watching uninitiated SEC teams attempt to defend Ole Miss or Tennessee by making only minor tweaks in their alignments, personnel, or calls and hoping that will allow them to play their normal style of defense. The nature of the Veer and Shoot is that they will break rules you wouldn’t break in order to get an edge.
Options for Texas against the Veer and Shoot
There is one style of defense that often fares pretty well against Veer and Shoot teams without having to drastically alter their scheme or structure. If you’re willing to sit back in man coverage most of the time and take your chances with the offense taking shots on your defensive backs (and not just your cornerbacks) 1-on-1…you’re in business.
To revisit the example from part I against Oklahoma, observe how the leverage changes for the offense when the defense drops a safety down in man coverage.
Here was the previous example against Texas when the Longhorns were playing Quarters:
Here’s how it would look against single-high, man coverage:
There are no easy throws against man coverage with defenders directly lined up on all the receivers. Runs inside face six defenders with only five blockers. If the quarterback can run it gets dicier but otherwise the defense is basically just accepting the risk in the passing game and daring the offense to beat them throwing the ball against coverage.
Veer and Shoot teams often struggle to beat good coverage because so many teams just play zone against the spacing stress. However, the math on deep shots can be pretty lopsided and still work out in the offense’s favor. There have been many games in history where a defense played man coverage on a Veer and Shoot offense and shut them down…until the offense started getting guys loose on switch routes or something and quickly blew the game open with a few landed shots. If you stay in man, the offense will start dialing up their plays designed to beat man coverage and things can get real in a hurry.
But if you’re up for that sort of targeted attack there are a lot of advantages to the man coverage approach. The Edges can stay in normal alignments and keep the ball contained in the box, the linebackers can focus on being linebackers rather than wishing they could teleport, and it’s easy to line up against tempo quickly. In our example above, if freed from the constraints of trying to present disguise or executing multiple calls the defense could have the cornerback travel inside on the receiver and have the strong safety go outside to play the less dangerous tight end.
If Texas can do things that way, everything gets easier against these teams. If the Horns want to stay in two-high quarters out of need or preference, they’ll need some new solutions. In the clip above, they were actually somewhat close to arriving at a potential solution via personnel. The Longhorns spun Anthony Hill down to Buck for that snap, which gave them some flexibility with dropping the Buck into space, and behind him was speedy Morice Blackwell at Will linebacker. That’s about as close to 3-2-6 Dime personnel as you can get without actually committing all the way.
Texas would be very well served to develop a specific defensive package for the Veer and Shoot, akin to how Pete Kwiatkowski always had Dime packages designed to stop the Air Raid in the Apple Cup when he coached at Washington. For Quarters, the best option would probably be to trade out a linebacker (not Hill) for a Dime safety and align that extra safety to the 4th most dangerous skill player on offense.
It could be just about anyone but you’d want someone reliable in zone with the lateral quickness to offer sideline to sideline range and tackling ability. It might just be Jahdae Barron with Jaylon Guilbeau taking his spot outside at star, it could also be Andrew Mukuba.
With a Dime safety replacing a linebacker, you could arrange your defenders as follows against the two most common 4-out spread sets:
If the “Jack” Edge is strong enough to two-gap on inside runs and get inside of the tackle, that helps the Dime backer a lot because he doesn’t have to get all the way back inside on a running play. He just needs to show up on the edge if the running back bounces outside.
If the 4th receiver is aligned to the boundary then the Dime backer follows him there.
The two deep safeties can play flat-footed and still show up to limit runs and prevent quarterback option plays from out-leveraging the defense like they often do against single-high man coverage. If you CAN play with two deep safeties against the Veer and Shoot it’s helpful because it’s harder for the offense to hit big plays or blow a hole in the run defense that can’t be patched by safeties in run support.
When the offense plays the tight end in the box, the defense is left small, and that’s the tradeoff. You have to be able to survive against the run undersized, which would have been easier in 2023 when Texas was bigger at D-tackle. But generally speaking, if you can take away shots down the field and easy throws into space, Veer and Shoot teams become much less dangerous on the scoreboard even if they pile up some rushing yards. You can always sub size back onto the field in the red zone.
There’s one other, final trick which could help Texas adjust to playing these sorts of teams without abandoning their Match Quarters coverages. Namely, to overplay the offensive strengths. These Veer and Shoot teams live to isolate their best players in space and generate all sorts of wonky formations designed to allow them to do so. Much of the time their intention is obvious, like on the Oklahoma play above where they have an outside receiver in the slot matched on a conflicted Will linebacker. But defenses aren’t designed or accustomed to contorting their structures as much as the offenses do in order to keep those star players in check and tempo makes it even more difficult.
But let’s say the offense really only has one particular receiver who’s a truly scary deep threat and the offense loves to move him around to create advantageous 1-on-1 matchups. A solution Nick Saban finally found last year at Alabama is to play Cover 2 to whichever side the truly dangerous receiver is on while having the other safety stay flat-footed and perhaps shallow to support the run.
Tennessee had a slot receiver last year named Squirrel White they’d put into the boundary stacked behind another receiver so they could crush man coverage from questionable defenders. Let’s say the H is the really dangerous receiver. If Texas wanted to borrow from Alabama their solution would be something like this:
Getting the H receiver open deep would be pretty difficult if the safety to his side of the field is always bailing deep down the hash. The other safety can position himself to play the run more aggressively while the defense takes its chances with other receivers 1-on-1. The chances of holding up against deep shots without giving up the ghost are much better if you force the offense to do it without their best receiver.
Against this style of offense it really pays to overplay matchups, these teams don’t generally have a lot of options to adjust if you play the game on their terms rather than trying to stay rigid to your own normal system. Many people will dismiss these extreme brands of spread offense as “gimmicky” but few will accept that defense must also embrace that gimmicky nature to properly counter them.
PK figured out something similar against the run-averse Air Raid run by Mike Leach’s Washington State Cougars. He needs to arrive at a similar conclusion in 2024 against the more balanced but overly matchup-focused Veer and Shoot offenses.
The post How can Texas adapt to defend SEC spread offenses? appeared first on On3.
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