Sorting out some email for blog fodder

It’s the holiday period where formal interviews and practice sessions are rare for access to players and coaches. But it’s time to get back to blogging, even if coming up with stories and columns is a little tough for a few days.

But over the past week, I’ve received some interesting emails from readers and it may be worth using them as a platform to kick off a discussion.

Here is one such letter and my commentary at the bottom.

Hello Mr. Harmon,

I am a fan of BYU football. Like a lot of fans, I had great expectations of this BYU team. I think what Bronco Mendenhall has done with this team is outstanding. Greatness is expected of this team year in and year out. We were a 10-3 team this year, and all 3 losses came to very respectable teams.

However, I do have a bone to pick with the defensive play-calling. All year long there was no pressure being put on the opposing quarterbacks. I don’t feel that there were enough blitzes. Same look every game, nearly every play. I understand that the defense has changed year to year with the arsenal of players that we’ve had in the past. With Aaron Francisco, there were a lot of different looks. He had the capability to be everywhere (although I am not a fan of the 3-3-5). With Bryan Kehl, we had a quick linebacker which allowed us to get out of that 3-3-5 into something more traditional.

With Jan Jorgensen being our defensive leader, I feel that coach’s Hill and Mendenhall thought that he would bring enough pressure. Without help and only rushing 3, he was ineffective. The defense started off the year okay but against sub-par opponents. As the year went on, offenses knew our defense used no pressure and had a slow secondary. Why did we not bring more pressure?

Aloha,

Ira Boswell

—

Well, all good points.

I think Mendenhall and Hill started the season with pressure against foes like Northern Iowa, Washington and UCLA but quickly discovered the lack of speed by the outside linebackers prohibited an aggressive call on game plans. Utah State and UNLV exposed this early. This seriously hampered the ability to drop linebackers into coverage or bring them from the edge with blitzes. Outside David Nixon, it was tough to get pressure from linebackers and teams keyed on him. Good teams figured this out and started to exploit the Cougars on the edges.

It didn’t help that Nixon, the best linebacker, got hurt at Utah State and then played the remainder of the season with those injuries.

The first line of defense is always to protect against the most simple thing, the run. BYU had to move Jan Jorgensen inside to protect one of the left side gaps against the power run right up the middle. That took him out of many of the pass rush formations he was so good at off the edge. BYU actually tried to make it work with different formations and even went to a four-man front many times the rest of the season, inserting four defensive linemen. This of course, was different from the 3-4 front adopted a couple of years ago.

When you change things up front, it starts to affect not only linebacker play, but the secondary. A lot of people are really down on the secondary this past year. While I can’t sit here and defend the way they played, I do believe they had to do many of their coverages to protect what was going on up front. I remember after one game in the middle of the season, we asked Mendenhall how many times he blitzed. He said he brought the heat 12 times and the result was 12 pass completions (UNLV?).

At times, because of the snowball effect of BYU’s front seven shifts, the Cougars actually had more success at times with a three-man rush because it took blockers off guard when they thought they had numbers. Credit Jorgensen and some of the others.

Much has been made of the speed of BYU’s secondary. I’d be more worried about the speed of linebackers than other aspects after talking to my sources since the last game.

To play this defense, BYU needs linebackers who can cover and move like safeties. When they can do this, like last year, the corners can funnel receivers into a sort of kill zone where they can receive help from linebackers and safeties. It’s almost better for BYU to have big, physical corners to complement fast linebackers, this way they can rough up receivers on those short routes that Utah and Arizona hit them with so successfully. Speedy linebackers like a year ago can get in position to administer big hits and force receivers out of their comfort zone. BYU couldn’t do this very well this past year.

The scouting report on the Cougar defense at the end of the year was to not go over the top on BYU because they protected the back end of the defense. Instead, the plan was to hit receivers and backs with short, quick passes, because without help from linebackers in coverage, receivers could make yards in space. The thing these offensive coordinators noticed as the biggest difference in the Cougar defense this year was the linebackers, not the secondary.

Ben Criddle was very physical and a good tackler in 2007. Brandon Howard and Scott Johnson were not that physical and he could not “shake up” receivers and get them thinking about hits rather than the ball in the air this year, although Johnson actually became a very good tackler. He just didn’t rattle any fillings. This is why Andrew Rich was a decent change up at corner with Scott Johnson went down. He’ll move to safety, however, next year.

Back to speed. One “expert” I talked to since the bowl game said if you lined up all the corners in the league and ran them in a hundred yard dash, Howard would finish in the top three. He’s just small. Speed. BYU has rarely had much speed in the secondary, yet, they’ve been able to put up some pretty good defenses in the past. They’ve done it by getting tough with hits.

What BYU needs in absence of four speed guys in the secondary, are safeties and corners who can deliver some hits and manhandle receivers in and out of coverage and kind of negate their speed. Of course, it makes things worse if corners run 4.6s instead of 4.5s. It is a luxury at BYU to have 4.4 corners and they only come around once in a while.

BYU’s never going to have secondary guys who can cover a Darney Scott and Rowe at San Diego State on the hoof. The secondary will always be chasing faster guys in open space. That’s why it is important to get pressure up front and force teams into quick decisions and short passing routes. It’s ironic that without a great pass rush this year, teams actually found it more productive to go to the short pass rather than the long bomb on the Cougar secondary.

But that’s what they saw would work. I also think BYU’s blitz packages have been around for a while and with this group of linebackers, it was easy to read and then neutralize with blockers.

I think Hill and Mendenhall recognized some of these issues early, maybe even in two-a-days back in August and set the defense up to be very, very conservative. When you have players like Bryan Kehl and Kelly Poppinga, it gives you the luxury of doing many things with a pass rush and coverage. When you don’t, flexibility is limited.

It is interesting, however to hear Jorgensen say he believes BYU could have utilized its talent in a more productive way this past season.