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good read from 2016 on Wade’s defense

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How the Broncos’ defense upended the NFL by moving past X’s and O’s to something more simple
“We’re different — a lot different,” Sylvester Williams said.

Aug. 15, 2016

link: http://www.denverpost.com/2016/08/20/broncos-defense-upended-nfl-simple/

It is the Broncos’ “Bear” call. Sylvester Williams, a hulking, 313-pound nose tackle, the largest player on Denver’s defensive line, a guy who gets paid to get in the way, drops into pass coverage.

“That ain’t normal,” Williams said. “But that’s one of my favorite plays.”

His job on this play is to keep a running back from catching the ball. No defense ever asks a nose tackle to play like a cornerback. The Broncos are not like everyone else.

“We’re different — a lot different,” he said.

When the Denver defense lines up next month to open the season in a rematch against Carolina quarterback Cam Newton and the Panthers, it will be trying to duplicate one of the most impressive playoff showings of all time, capped by a brilliant Super Bowl. In that game, Denver sacked Newton six times, intercepted one of his passes, scored a touchdown and nearly scored another. It put that defense in a discussion among the great defenses of the past 30 years.

But the league does not quite know what it sees in the Denver D. The Broncos are an outlier in the staid NFL. They confuse fans and hardcore insiders. With defensive coordinator Wade Phillips, a football lifer who learned from his dad, Bum, the Broncos are conservative radicals, a stick-to-basics defense that bucks the trend of complicated schemes in favor of beautiful simplicity.

The best defense in the NFL plays in plain sight. And nobody can pin it down.

“They say they know what we’re going to do,” Phillips said, “but can they stop us?”

JUST GO PLAY

To borrow a board game tagline, the Broncos’ defense takes a minute to learn and a lifetime to master. Bum Phillips upset the defensive order in the 1950s when he was coaching small town high school football in East Texas. He developed a way to number defensive lineman to make it easy for kids to know their roles. And he introduced a 3-4 defense — three linemen up front, four linebackers in the middle. His ideas trickled up the ladder.

Paul “Bear” Bryant borrowed Bum’s ideas at Texas A&M in the late ’50s. The NFL, with many teams still using five-man fronts built to stop the run and ignore the pass, soon followed. And the 3-4 defense began to take hold.

Wade Phillips, who also came up through the Texas high school ranks, spun the 3-4 even further. He recognized that the 3-4 can be the most adaptable defense in football. It’s built to let players do what they can do best. If a linebacker is good at coverage, let him cover. If a cornerback can rush the passer, cut him loose. And if a 313-pound nose tackle is quick enough to chase a running back, go for it.

“That’s our philosophy. Just do what the guy can do,” Phillips said. “I can think of a lot of different defenses. But it’s about what the players can do. I’ve always thought that way. When I coached in high school, some guys can’t play very well at all and you have to get by with what they can do. Maybe I got that from my dad. But when I started coaching, it just made sense to me that way.”

But the Broncos can play very well. They can do just about everything. So the simple structure of the 3-4 allows them to be unpredictable. Positions and roles are only words for roster sheets. In theory, the Xs and Os are starting points. In practice, players play everywhere.

“It is simple. That’s Wade’s goal. It allows you to just play,” Broncos cornerback Bradley Roby said. “The best defenses that I’ve seen, and the research that I’ve done, the common thing I get is they’re simple. Everybody knows their job, everybody knows their adjustments and everybody plays together. Wade’s defense, being simple, it allows our athletes to just go play.”

PLAYING TAG TEAM

This moldability allowed the Denver defense to baffle offenses last season. After the Broncos held Cincinnati to 200 yards passing in an overtime victory in late December, the Bengals’ receivers could not agree on what defeated them. The Broncos played a zone defense. No, it was man-to-man. No, they switched at halftime. No one seemed sure.

The truth is between the lines. Bill Green, a legend in Indiana high school basketball, developed a hybrid defense in the late 1960s and ’70s, that starts as a zone and morphs into man-to-man. Instead of defending one-on-one everywhere, a player defends face-to-face in his area, then withdraws if that player crosses a boundary.

Phillips loves this idea. If Broncos cornerback Chris Harris starts on the right side covering A.J. Green, for example, he can follow him around like a jacket until Green wanders too far, then Aqib Talib takes over.

“We play a matchup zone,” Phillips said, not afraid to reveal his playbook. “It looks like man until you pass him off to somebody else. We started it from basketball, way, way back. Everybody was playing 2-1-2 zone and if the ball went to one side, they stayed in place. But then later on they started moving over. We thought, “Well, we can do that. We’ve got five receivers going out, that’s the same concept as basketball.’ ”

The Broncos’ defense is a tag-team. It plays one-on-one until it decides to play two-on-one. This helped them hold opponents to the fewest yards and the fourth fewest points in the NFL last season.

“It’s simple, but it’s not easy,” Roby said. “There’s a lot of pressure. The heat is on. But that pressure is what makes us work at our best. We’re used to being in man coverage when the game is on the line. When I was younger, in college, any time I’d get a man call, I’d be nervous. But not now.

“In the end, it’s a one-on-one league. As a defense, we win those battles the majority of the time. If it’s a left tackle one-on-one with Von Miller, he’s winning that in two seconds. Teams have to catch us slipping, really.”

Even longtime veterans of the game get confused by Denver’s defense. During the Broncos’ first preseason game, at Chicago, former safety and now broadcaster John Lynch commented about how aggressive Denver was blitzing the quarterback. This set off a battle of semantics after the game.

Phillips retorted on Twitter, saying the Broncos never blitzed. They rushed four defenders, sometimes five, but they never blitzed. A rush is not a blitz. When a defense blitzes the quarterback, they are sacrificing numbers in the secondary in order to add an advantage at the line of scrimmage. It’s a gamble.

“The true meaning of a blitz in football is six guys are rushing and five guys are covering five receivers,” Phillips said. “If a backer or a safety gets a sack, they usually say it’s a blitz. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But a dog (rush) is five people. And a four-man rush or a three-man rush is different.”

Under Phillips, the Broncos rarely blitz. They don’t need to. They can send a four-man rush with Williams and defensive end Derek Wolfe and two linebackers, maybe Miller and Brandon Marshall, or two linebackers and two corners, or a corner and a safety with a lineman and a backer. The combinations are endless. It’s all a rush. And the Broncos can just as easily get to the quarterback without gambling on a blitz.

That way, they can keep their numbers advantage in coverage and still pressure the quarterback. Between options A and B, the Broncos choose all of the above.

“It’s simple — get to the ball,” Williams said. “That’s Wade’s No. 1 rule. Get to the ball. At the end of the day, if you get to the ball, you make plays, you do your job.”

Defenses are necessarily reactive. The offense possess the ball. It dictates the terms. It moves first. The Broncos’ defense, though, is impatient. It doesn’t want to wait for the other team to act first. So Denver often makes the first move.

“We’re a play-making defense,” Williams said. “We’re designed to get up the field. We’re not holding up blocks. We’re not two-gap. We’re making plays. I love this defense.”

SIMPLY CRAZY

Phillips, who was out of football and semi-retired in 2014 before he returned to the Broncos, waited a lifetime for a defense to match his philosophy. He was Denver’s defensive coordinator from 1989-92, then head coach in ’93-94. The Broncos reached the Super Bowl once in that span, in 1990, a blowout loss to the 49ers. His defenses were good. But they weren’t great.

This defense is great. The difference now is personnel. The Broncos have one of the best defenders in the league, in Von Miller, and the best cornerbacks, in Roby, Harris and Talib, and they have defensive linemen who can play in pass coverage and linebackers, such as Brandon Marshall, who can cover ground like a sprinter.

And unlike many other teams, the Broncos’ defensive playbook is thin. The scheme is straightforward. Players play. Chase the ball. Get it done. Phillips figured this out over decades. His idea is to turn over the defense to the guys on the field.

“He’s got a lot of swag,” Williams said. “We have very few calls. He says to the defense, ‘Just make plays!’ That’s his mindset. He’ll call the call, then let us play football. It’s a player’s defense.

“Coach Wade is a genius, man. We trust him because he trusts us.”

WHY RAMS’ SCHEME CHANGE WON’T AFFECT AARON DONALD
With Wade Phillips in as the Rams’ new defensive coordinator, Sam Monson explores the impact of a defensive scheme change.

https://www.profootballfocus.com/pro-why-rams-scheme-change-wont-affect-aaron-donald/

Nothing causes hysteria and concern among a fanbase like a new coaching hire that brings with it the prospect of a change in defensive scheme up front.

This offseason, Wade Phillips was let go as defensive coordinator in Denver following the head-coaching change there, and was quickly snatched up by the Los Angeles Rams, replacing the departing Greg Williams in the same role. That means a switch in scheme for Los Angeles between 4-3 and 3-4 defensive fronts, which immediately raises questions about whether the Rams have the personnel for that change, and what it means for star defensive tackle, Aaron Donald, a player that has ranked first and second in PFF’s Top 101 player list over the past two years, respectively.

The answer to that last question: almost nothing.

In reality, there isn’t much distinction between 3-4 and 4-3 schemes today the way there once was.

When the 3-4 was first in vogue back in the 1990s, it was a two-gap system, where giant behemoths on the D-line played head-up over their blockers, defending the gap to either side of them and occupying space for the linebackers behind them to make plays uncontested. 4-3 defenses were typically one-gap schemes with smaller bodies up front that attacked gaps and won with penetration, while the 3-4 was a system where the linebackers, not the defensive linemen, were the stars, and the big bodies up front controlled multiple gaps without overcommitting to either one.

Today’s 3-4 defenses are very different animals, and predominantly one-gap systems, just like the 4-3. The NFL is generally a one-gap league these days, and there is very little two-gapping deployed as the league has trended towards smaller, quicker players across the board. Gargantuan nose tackles of the past like Ted Washington, Gilbert Brown and Grady Jackson have been eased out in favor of more athletic players that can move down the line, rush the passer, and not just occupy space. Sub 300-pound defensive tackles are not uncommon, and you will even find 3-4 nose tackles that barely tip the scales at over 300 pounds.

The real driving force behind the adjustments in scheme is the passing game. The NFL is a passing league and now lives in nickel defense, not base. Most teams run with three wide receivers on offense instead of a fullback or second tight end, so defenses have countered with an extra defensive back. Last season, base 4-3 and 3-4 defenses combined (with just four defensive backs on the field) accounted for only 27 percent of defensive snaps, while nickel defense (five defensive backs) was at 55 percent, and dime (six defensive backs) another 10.

What used to be your every-down defense is now being used on average only a quarter of the time. Even if two teams have dramatically different base defensive alignments, they are in sub packages far more often, and those sub packages are much more uniform in structure. Base defenses can see significant differences in alignment, but while the 55 percent of snaps the league spends in nickel defense breaks down into a few different personnel groupings, most of them are essentially different ways of achieving the same alignment.

Whether you are a 3-4 or 4-3 base defense, moving to a nickel personnel grouping takes somebody out of the front-seven and adds a player to the secondary. When that happens, most teams deploy the remaining six players up front in more or less the same way because it is the most efficient way of accounting for every gap along the line.

The first guy to get sacrificed is the big nose tackle for 3-4 teams. Linemen that weigh 320-plus pounds may still be great run defenders, but they tend to offer little as pass-rushing threats. 4-3 teams typically lose one of their three linebackers, leaving both schemes with two edge defenders, two interior defenders and two off-the-ball linebackers to go along with their five defensive backs. The only difference is exactly how those edge defenders stand when they line up. Whether you’re a 3-4 or 4-3 base team, the alignment of the front four in nickel and dime defense tends to wind up the same, but is still differentiated by anachronistic position designations that no longer make sense as descriptive tools.

This image shows Denver’s defense under Wade Phillips and the Rams’ defense under Greg Williams from last year, superimposed into one image.

The teams were both facing near enough the same offensive formation, and they deployed their front four in identical gap alignments. The only difference between the two was that the player furthest to the right side playing on the edge was an outside linebacker for the Broncos (DeMarcus Ware) who rushed from a two-point stance, but for the Rams, that player was a defensive end that had his hand in the dirt (Eugene Sims).

Those players are listed at different positions on the roster, but have identical roles from the exact same alignment on the play in this situation. The distinction between linebacker and defensive end is far less meaningful in the world of nickel defense than that between edge defender, interior defender and off-the-ball linebacker, which is why the Pro-Bowl ballot will remain broken until it adopts that shift in player designation.

The difference in the stance of the edge defender between two-point and hand in the dirt may not even be a team-prescribed technique. There are teams in the league (the Patriots, being one) that allow their edge defenders to choose which they feel more comfortable with on any given play, effectively leaving the designation of that defensive front to one player’s whim each snap (if all you care about is how many players have their hand in the ground). As long as he is lined up in the right spot, those teams don’t care if he is in a two- or three-point stance, so the label of linebacker or defensive end is entirely meaningless and arbitrary for that player on that play.

The same thing is true for interior defenders, too. Aaron Donald is known as a 3-technique defensive tackle, or “under-tackle” in a 4-man defensive-line scheme. 3-technique is simply the name of the defensive-line technique that sees a player lined up over the outside shoulder of the guard, ready to attack the gap to his outside. Most pass-rushing defensive tackles primarily play in that specific technique, but so do most pass-rushing 3-4 defensive ends. Calais Campbell, in Arizona’s 3-4 scheme, plays more 3-technique than any other technique—and more than many defensive tackles—but is listed as a defensive end on the roster. Donald’s alignment distribution in 2016 almost exactly matches that of Denver’s defensive ends, Derek Wolfe and Jared Crick.

The defense that Wade Phillips runs does have some eccentricities compared to other systems in the league—they tend to stay in base defense longer than most teams and then leap straight to six defensive backs, bypassing the nickel packages of five DBs altogether. Even in base defense, though, it is very much like a 4-3 scheme from an alignment standpoint.

When looking at the alignment distribution of Wolfe against Donald last year, the only difference between the two is a small spike for Wolfe in the 4-technique spot, the technique that plays head up over the tackle (the original 3-4 two-gap style alignment we mentioned earlier). There will be plays where we see Donald lined up in this spot, but Wolfe played there less than half as often as he played in the 3-technique spot that Donald usually occupied, and even in that alignment, he is going to be tasked with shooting a gap and defeating that tackle with quickness and hand speed rather than trying to eat up space and two-gap either side of him. In Phillips’ scheme, it is more of a disguise measure than it is a statement of two-gapping intent.

We are going to see Aaron Donald and the rest of the Rams’ defense lining up in a new defensive front under Wade Phillips in 2017, but if you can look beyond how many players have their hand in the ground, operating from a three-point stance, you’ll see that the alignment of those players has changed little despite the shift from 4-3 to 3-4. That once was a seismic shift that required a complete retooling of your defensive personnel to make it work, but in today’s NFL, it’s just a different way to shuffle the same cards. Aaron Donald may now be labelled as a 3-4 defensive end, but he will be the same destructive force as an interior defender as he has been over the past couple of seasons.

Blue and Gold wrote:

Wade said that he’s going to keep Aaron Donald as a pure 3-tech, so he will go from side to side, depending on the line call. Brockers will remain a 1-tech(shade) on the center. So, the tackles will not change. The player opposite Donald will usually be in a 5-tech (maybe a tight 5) or sometimes A 4-tech (head up on the tackle).

Easley can back up the 5-tech and 3-tech and maybe even spell Brockers on the nose, though that’s not his forte. They sigend a kid from 49ers who will have chance to be backup to Brockers.

Westbrooks, I think, is penciled in as the 5-tech and he will have to switch sides, go the opposite side as Donald.

the LBers, one will be a DE on any given play and one will be a LBer and that can switch given the call.

In nickel both OLBer will be DEs and Donald will be one DT, I’d guess Easley will be the other, but the 4 best pass rushers will have their hands in the dirt..so if Westrbooks steps up he could secure a spot in the nickel DL

Zooey wrote:

zn wrote:

Okay. I liked Apocalypto though. And, I have no plans to buy any Bush paintings.

I never heard of Apocalypto. Was he a Spanish Surrealist?

In a way.

sanbagger wrote:

zn wrote:

They had a veteran minicamp before the draft. Kromer had a chance to see how his young center prospects are looking. That was apparently enough of an indication for them to take OL off the board when the draft came up.

That’s the key for me…and I don’t think they were sold on the depth of the O-line in this draft.

All that said….I agree, it has to work and hope the curse of the O-line has been wiped out by McV and Kromer.

About that. My view:

1. The Rams had decent OLs and good OL coaching from 2012-2015, but what hurt them was injuries. I mean massive, extensive injuries. Sometimes this gets responded to with people saying “well all teams have injuries”—and no, not all teams have unit killing multiple extensive simultaneous injuries to their OLs. And the ones that do generally suffer (unless they have a qb who can still excel in those conditions, like Brady or Wilson).

2. In fact when the Rams OLs were relatively healthy from the 2nd half of 2012 through 2013, they did fine. When they were multiply injured and/or very inexperienced (2015) they predictably did not do as well.

3. They were awful in 2016 but that came from a lot of causes. To me 2016 was a perfect cluster storm of multiple things all going wrong at once. I think 2016 was unique.

4. 2016 is over, Kromer has a nice history, and he has indicated that in fact in Buffalo he was looking at some of the guys the Rams drafted in 2015. So he thinks there’s guys to work with. We agree they better be right, but still. Plus of course they added Whitworth and Sullivan (I am one of those who believes Sullivan has already shown he can still play). SO it is possible that they could get back to being decent. I absolutely would not rule that out, though of course, I ain’t committing to full optimism on this until we have visible on the field evidence.